On Dec. 3, Storm Duplantis, an intermittent, part time, non-student employee, was arrested and charged for malfeasance in office as a result of writing fraudulent parking tickets for cars on campus.
“We hired a ticket writer on Sept. 13. We trained him, and then he independently worked. This ticket writer was an intermittent ticket writer. It’s not a student. It’s an individual we hired from the community. We usually hire two of them a year, and they write tickets for us in the morning hours. After his training, we released him to write his tickets,” Chief of University Police Craig Jaccuzzo said.
Duplantis went through a screening process and was trained for the first three weeks of his employment on how to identify parking violations and how to write the appropriate citations. For the first two months of his employment, there were no anomalies.
On Nov. 18, 2013, Officer Denise D’Andrea, assistant director of Parking Services, received complaints from student who were charged for parking violations, even though they never received an actual ticket. Officer D’Andrea learned that Duplantis issued the tickets and reminded him make sure he was properly taping the tickets to the cars and to reference the parking map he was issued.
By Dec. 2, five-to-10 students contacted Parking Services to appeal parking tickets. A majority of them stated that they did not even know that they had a parking violation until the charges showed up on their Banner account.
Upon further investigation, it was revealed that Duplantis had also written these tickets. Even more troubling was the fact that three of those citations were issued a minute apart from each other, and they all had the same decal number listed on the ticket even though they had different car descriptions and different license plate numbers.
Later that same day, there were about four to seven more phone calls about students receiving parking violations through Fee Collections, without ever receiving a physical ticket. These individuals were advised to complete a citation appeal through Parking Services.  
By Dec. 3, 10 to 15 more students contacted Parking Services with complaints about recent tickets that were charged on their Banner accounts. These complaints ranged from receiving physical tickets and only finding out about them through Banner or fee collections. Complaints also included instances where the citations listed their car parking in a different place than where they actually parked, visitor parking violations in lots where there are no visitor spots and parking violations on days when the individual did not drive their car on campus. It was discovered that Duplantis also wrote these violations.
That same day, Duplantis was confronted by D’Andrea, and denied any wrongdoing by expressing confusion that students were not receiving his citations. D’Andrea then expressed her suspicions that he was issuing fraudulent tickets and that he was not placing physical tickets on the cars because he knew students could use this as proof that the citations were invalid. Reportedly, Duplantis responded to the allegations with “a blank stare.” Afterwards he was notified of the termination of his employment.
On Dec. 5, Duplantis reported to NSU Police Department where he was officially questioned and subsequently detained. Duplantis claimed that at the start of November, he was reprimanded for not writing enough tickets. He stated that from this point forward, he would write four legitimate parking tickets a day. After writing a proper citation, he would walk to a nearby car and write a fraudulent citation, then throw the printed copy of the citation in the nearest garbage can. According to Duplantis’ estimates, he would write two to three fraudulent tickets per day.
Jacuzzo expressed his thoughts on the incident saying , “I don’t think people realize the level of accountability there is. Mr. Duplantis did not realize that he was being arrested or that he could get charged as a government employee for malfeasance in office. In the future, we will stress that this is not a joke. Too often, the campus looks at the police department and does not realize the level of authority and professionalism that we maintain along with the accountability we have to the students, faculty and staff.”
From December to mid-January, there was an audit where officers went through 615 individual records along with the 12 individual fields that came with these records.
After this audit, it was discovered that 57 tickets were issued fraudulently. Most ticket violations cost $50, with an exception of parking decal violations that cost $20. Jaccuzzo estimates that some students may have been fined up to $100 when late fees are taken into account. The students, who were issued the fraudulent tickets, had all fees or any other charges waived from their accounts. This incident did cost the University money because of the labor hours that were used during the audit.
“It’s an unfortunate incident, but when you have a system of checks and balances that allows for individuals like that to be caught, they are held accountable, and that is how the incident was corrected. Luckily, it was not more than 57 tickets because our department writes a lot of tickets,” Jaccuzzo said.   “We are not a security guard service, or a referral service for the sheriff or another police department. Our officers are trained, certified and have arrest authority through the state police.”