Ohio Man Who Made False Distress Call Fined $489,000 By Court
A Cincinnati court has ordered a 21-year-old Ohio man to pay $489,000 in fines and restitution charges after he was convicted of making a false distress call, reports ABC News. The 2-1 ruling at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati found that a lower court had “correctly” ordered Danik Shiv Kumar, the accused, to pay all the expenses incurred by agencies after Kumar’s false distress call resulted in a 21-hour search operation in Lake Erie by Canadian and US Coast Guards.
Kumar, who was a teenager at the time of the incident, made a distress call to authorities saying that he saw a fishing boat with four people on board sending up flares in Lake Erie. Kumar had taken off in a single-engine Cessna just 30 minutes ago from the Burke Lakefront Airport when he made a distress call to the Cleveland-Hopkins Airport control tower and reported seeing a vessel “launching up flares,” according to Mojosail. When asked for more details in a subsequent distress call, Kumar responded, “a 25-foot fishing vessel I guess you could say. Everyone had a life jacket with a strobe light. I counted four of them.”
Soon, over 70 personnel from the US Coast guard as well as the Canadian Coast guard put three boats, a helicopter and a small plane into service, scouring the area and looking for these people in trouble. The search lasted a good 21 hours before authorities decided to call it off. Kumar was investigated and a month after the incident, in April 2012, he changed his original statement of seeing a flare and a boat and said that in reality, he didn’t actually see anything!
Soon after this, Kumar pleaded guilty to making a false distress call and a federal judge sentenced him to three months in jail. He was also ordered to pay a total of $277,000 to the US Coast Guard and $212,000 to the Canadian Coast Guard to cover the cost of mounting the day-long, ultimately pointless “rescue operation” triggered by the false distress call.
The jury at the 6th Circuit majority opined that while the ruling is “an onerous burden on the shoulders of a young man,” the sentence was intended to give clear signals to people who plan elaborate hoaxes, and said that it would deter future such incidents from happening. Kumar’s attorney, Edmund Searby, said while the young man was certainly at mistake for making the false distress call, he felt the penalty was awfully large and that Kumar might never recover from the financial implications of this.
Kumar, who was enrolled at Bowling Green State University’s aviation program, had to drop out of it owing to the case. He is yet to chart out his future course of action.
Do you think this penalty for making a false distress call was simply too huge for the young man to pay off?
[Image via Cleveland.com]
