Lesley Mair, Scottish Good Samaritan, Gets Parking Ticket While Helping Sick Woman

When Lesley Mair noticed a lifeless woman lying on the street, she ditched her car and raced to action, but was then slapped with a parking ticket for her good deed.

The concerned Scottish do-gooder left her car in a disabled parking bay to help a young woman whom Mair initially feared was dead, the Edinburgh Evening News reports. After helping the sick lady to a bank where she recovered until paramedics arrived, Mair noticed a parking warden writing her a ticket.

“My only concern was for the lady on the street, I wasn’t looking where I was parking,” she told the paper.

But when Mair approached the warden and explained the specifics of the situation, he simply shrugged his shoulders in response, she told deadline.com.

Though the organization that oversees the city’s parking attendants said they were “satisfied” with the warden’s actions, according to the Edinburgh Evening News, transport convenor Lesley Hinds said she will investigate the matter and cancel the ticket if Mair was, in fact, assisting with a medical emergency.

But some advocates would likely argue that Mair shouldn’t have to go through the hassle of trying to get a ticket retracted after simply trying to do the right thing.

When George Echenhofer was driving to work in Philadelphia in the summer of 2011, he saw a pedestrian get struck by a motorist, according to the Philadelphia Daily News. He pulled in front of a truck-loading zone, supported the victim and directed traffic around the accident scene until police and medics arrived. He was then also slapped with a parking ticket.

He took time off of work to plead his case to a number of recalcitrant employees at the Philadelphia Police Association (PPA) to no avail. It was finally dropped only once Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky reached out to a spokesperson for the PPA.

“Echenhofer deserves an apology from the PPA, along with a pat on the back for being the kind of citizen who will stop to help a person in need,” Polaneczky wrote in an op-ed piece for the paper. “We should reward people like that, not punish them.”