A Summerfield snowbird found himself behind bars Thursday night after he was caught driving a pickup truck with a Vermont license plate that wasn’t registered to the vehicle.
A Marion County sheriff’s deputy ran the tag number for the black pickup truck that was being driven by 38-year-old Chad Alan Perkins and determined that it wasn’t assigned to a vehicle. The deputy conducted a traffic stop in the 6200 block of S.E. 132nd Street Road and explained to Perkins why he was being stopped.
Perkins told the deputy he was in the process of registering the vehicle in Vermont, where he lives part of the time. He said he had taken the tag off of one of his other vehicles while he waited for the state of Vermont to register the pickup, a sheriff’s office report states, adding that a computer check showed the tag didn’t belong to Perkins.
The computer check also showed that a certificate of destruction had been issued for the pickup in Florida and it had last been registered to Tri J Towing & Recovery Inc. in St. Petersburg. The deputy contacted the towing company and was told that the vehicle associated with the VIN number of the pickup had been crushed on March. 10. The VIN number also revealed that the truck didn’t have a current registration in Vermont, the report says.
Perkins, who lives at 14825 S.E. 100th Terr. in Summerfield, was taken into custody and transported to the Marion County Jail, where he was charged with failure to register a motor vehicle and attaching registration or a license plate that’s not assigned to a vehicle. He was released early Friday afternoon on $1,000 bond and his next court date hasn’t yet been set, jail records show.