• Correction: This article mistakenly included Patricia Brubaker’s speculation on what she believed “seemed” to have occurred after she saw a parking authority car pointed the wrong way on a one-way street. In fact, according to Toronto police computer records of tickets written that night, there was only one parking enforcement officer on the street who issued two tickets at two different times to two separate cars parked outside two addresses.

When Patricia Brubaker was woken up in the middle of the night last week by the sound of a rumbling car engine and radio outside her Cabbagetown home, she looked out her window and couldn’t believe what she saw.

“There was a parking authority car pointed the wrong way on my one-way street. And the officer was out giving a ticket to someone,” she said.

The University of Toronto professor who teaches medicine said she was annoyed that the officer was doing something illegal, but had no problem writing someone a ticket while doing it.

“I yelled out the window that it was a one-way street and the officer ignored me and drove away,” she said.

Brubaker has a security camera set up outside her home on Salisbury Ave. that caught the car driving the wrong way on the street.

About forty-five minutes later she was woken by the noise of another car. Suspicious, she looked out the window to take a look.

“I got up to look because I really wondered if it was the other officer coming back again to get rid of the ticket so he couldn’t be identified and caught for going the wrong way,” she said.

It was another officer, but a taller one this time, she said.

“He walked up to the windshield of this car and he took the ticket off and looked at it, then looked around and put a ticket back,” she says, adding that he was driving in the correct direction.

The next morning, Sept. 20, after she woke up she went to check the ticket on the car outside her home.

She expected to see the ticket stamped for about 3:15 a.m., when the first officer, the one going the wrong way, issued the ticket.

“Much to my surprise, the ticket was timed for about 45 minutes later,” she said.

Brubaker said she was immediately angry.

“So it seemed to me what had happened was that the second officer had come, likely at the request of the first officer, to replace the ticket so that the first officer couldn’t be identified”, she said, adding that no officer would want to be caught doing something illegal.

She asked the owner of the vehicle, who was a visitor to the area and didn’t have a permit, for a photocopy of the ticket.

Brubaker said it particularly annoyed her because she was involved in an accident just a few months ago in which she was hit by a wrong-way driver and injured.

She said that regardless of the time it happened she is bothered by it and said the car going the wrong way could have been a danger to pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles.

Const. Wendy Drummond, a spokesperson for the police, confirmed that there was an officer on Salisbury Ave. on Sept. 20 who was patrolling and tagging. She also confirmed that there were two tickets issued on the street, one at 3:15 a.m. and another at 3:58 a.m.

She said she was not able to comment on whether the ticket was replaced and the reasons why , but said that all tickets are processed through a computer system that would make it difficult to “do away” with a ticket for no reason.

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Drummond also said wrong-way driving was not acceptable and there would have to be a thorough investigation into the issue.

Brubaker said she would like the officer to be tracked and reprimanded.

“These people drive a car that says to serve and protect on the side of the car. Breaking the law and then attempting to hide it, that is unacceptable,” she said.