What The Hell America!

Gary Hudson excitedly planned a fishing trip with his 4-year-old son and purchased a kids fishing pole in late 2019. He tossed it in the trunk of his Ford Taurus and parked on the street outside his Hartford, Connecticut, home.

Within hours, his car was hauled away by a tow truck. Hudson couldn’t afford to pay the more than $300 in towing and storage fees and asked if he could at least get into the car to collect his belongings — the fishing pole and the safety vest and handcuffs he needed to work nights as a security guard.

He said he offered to pay $20 but that Whitey’s, a Hartford towing company, told him he had to pay the full amount. “They would not budge, period,” Hudson said. “So I can’t get my work equipment, and you expect me to make money to pay you?” When Hudson couldn’t afford to retrieve the car, he said, Whitey’s sold it, and he lost his belongings. Whitey’s has since closed, and its owner has died.

The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica have heard repeatedly from people with similar stories. Inside their vehicles, they had work equipment, child car seats or personal mementos, and towing companies refused to give them back.

Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles regulations say that vehicle owners can retrieve “personal property which is essential to the health or welfare of any person.” But that gives towing companies wide latitude in how they interpret the rule, and several people whose cars were towed said the companies used their belongings as leverage to get them to pay towing and storage fees.

Past reporting by CT Mirror and ProPublica showed how Connecticut’s laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of vehicle owners. Connecticut has one of the shortest windows in the country between when a car is towed and when tow companies can consider it abandoned and start the process of selling it — companies have to wait just 15 days for vehicles worth less than $1,500. People with low incomes have been particularly impacted by these laws, the news organizations found.

Some nearby states, like Rhode Island, have no law on the books about getting possessions from towed cars. But in those that do, the list of items owners must be allowed to retrieve is often broader than Connecticut’s. Maine allows people to retrieve clothing, car seats, medications and mail. In New York, people can retrieve anything from the vehicle. A bill in the Massachusetts legislature would let its drivers do the same.

In an interview last year, Michelle Givens, the Connecticut DMV’s assistant legal director, said she couldn’t say whether work equipment qualified as essential to health or welfare.

“It’s broad,” Givens said. “I can’t answer that and sit here and say, ‘Yes, that will qualify.’”

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera said he thought car owners should file a complaint with the agency if they weren’t able to get their belongings out. The complaint process can take weeks, however, which is often longer than the period before a towing company is allowed to sell a car.

Timothy Vibert, president of the industry association Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said people can generally retrieve medicine or tools, but he said that part of the law shouldn’t apply if people wait months to get them. He added that when people don’t pay the towing fees, it makes towers reluctant to return their belongings.

“If somebody owed you $800 and they called up and said they wanted to get something out of their car,” he asked, “it’s OK for them to waltz down here and take their things and then leave you with an $800 bill?”

Other towers say they are more lenient. Sal Sena, owner of Sena Brothers and Cross Country Automotive in Hartford, said if someone has keys to the vehicle or can prove it’s theirs, he lets them get stuff out of it regardless if they pay the fees.

“I don’t care if you take stuff out, but I just want to make sure you’re not putting my ass in a situation where I’m gonna get in trouble,” Sena said. “You got the key? Then take what you want out of the car because then I can justify it.”

Connecticut lawmakers are looking to change the state’s towing laws. House Bill 7162, which was voted out of committee in March, would overhaul the law and allow owners to retrieve “any personal property” from a towed motor vehicle.

The bill “makes a strong effort to identify and correct abusive practices in the towing industry that have had a serious and detrimental effect on motor vehicle owners,” legal aid attorney Rafie Podolsky said in public testimony.

Tow company employees and owners have objected to the bill, saying it would make it harder for them to tow vehicles that are parked illegally or unsafely and that towers didn’t have enough involvement in crafting the legislation.

Transportation Committee co-chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, said during a March meeting that the importance of the issue hit home for her because of “the number of folks” who have told her they got towed and weren’t allowed to retrieve belongings from their vehicles.

“The people should certainly be made aware of their rights with respect to towed vehicles,” she said.

Hudson, who had planned the fishing trip, had to save up to replace his holster, mace and safety equipment for the security job, which he estimated cost him about $1,000. He canceled the fishing trip and said he failed his son “by breaking a promise.”

“It really, really hurt,” Hudson said.

Hudson is one of several people who told the news organizations they lost things they needed for work — tools, chef’s knives, even the draft of a movie script.

Paul Boudreau, a carpenter and mechanic in Hamden, said he lost his entire carpentry tool set worth more than $1,500 when his Chevrolet Blazer was towed from his apartment complex in April 2021.

The vehicle wasn’t registered because it couldn’t pass an emissions test, and his mechanic was waiting on a part that was hard to get during the supply chain crisis following the COVID-19 lockdown. The apartment complex’s management gave him more time to get it registered, he said, so he was surprised when he looked out his window and saw a tow truck hooking up his vehicle.

He said MyHoopty.com, a towing company in Watertown, told him it would cost more than $300 to get it back. With his wife recovering from cancer, his carpentry work scarce because of the pandemic and “not a penny in cash,” Boudreau realized he couldn’t afford to retrieve his car.

Still, he asked multiple times to retrieve his tools and was denied, he told the DMV in a complaint, which included an itemized list of tools. But MyHoopty owner Michael Festa said in an interview, “At no point did anyone contact us or attempt to come down and retrieve any personal belongings that may have been in the vehicle.”

The Connecticut DMV found that MyHoopty committed no violations related to the tow but did not address the items Boudreau said were in the vehicle.

“Anybody we talked to was like, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” Boudreau said in an interview.

After 18 days, MyHoopty submitted a form to sell the Blazer.

The tows at his apartment complex led Boudreau to become a tenant union organizer. He said state legislators always tell him that when it comes to landlords, their “property is sacred.”

“Why isn’t our property sacred? Why isn’t our car sacred?” Boudreau asked about tenants. “Wealthy people’s property is always sacred, but poor people’s property doesn’t mean a thing.”

Other drivers lost belongings that held sentimental value — photographs, a sewing project, a prayer card from their father’s funeral.

When Brandon Joyner’s Nissan Maxima was towed from the front of his Bridgeport home in 2017, he lost photos of his mother and aunt that had never been digitized, which he’d traveled with since he got his license as a teenager. He also had shoes, clothing and a car seat for his nieces and nephews in the vehicle, he said.

The car was towed because Joyner owed motor vehicle taxes on it. After a couple of weeks of saving, he paid the taxes. But when he asked for his car, he said he was told it had been sold.

“Everything was just gone,” he said.

It took him months to afford a new vehicle, in part because he was still paying down the old loan from the bank. When he told them he no longer had the vehicle and didn’t want to pay on it, it damaged his credit score, making it harder to get a loan for a new car, he said.

“It was hurtful, because there’s nothing you can really do,” Joyner said. “No matter how many people you talk to, you lose things, and it’s nobody’s fault, nobody cares.”