UN‘FARE’ SHAKE: Enid Dunlap at Merrick Laundry yesterday — where her troubles began last year after a late-night cabby refused to stop for police. (
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A Queens woman claims she got taken for a ride — right to a jail cell.
Enid Dunlap was heading home after a late-night trip to a laundromat last year when she was tossed in the slammer for nearly a day without being charged after her cabdriver fled from police with her in tow, according to a new lawsuit.
“It was like a movie you couldn’t believe,” Dunlap told The Post. “It was a nightmare.”
The harrowing tale unfolded when the 53-year-old Laurelton resident was trying to figure out how to get home with nine large bags of laundry at around 2 a.m. in February 2012.
“That’s the best time to go,” she said of the late hour. “You have access to all the machines you want.”
A car-service driver, stationed near the 24-hour laundromat at Merrick Road and 223rd Street, offered to drive her home. Dunlap, however, had used all her cash doing her wash, and the store’s ATM wasn’t working.
But the driver agreed to take her to another ATM, so she hopped in. She dropped off her clothes at home, and got back in the cab to get the dough to pay the driver.
As the driver was pulling into a gas station, Dunlap heard the “whoop-whoop” of a police car’s siren — indicating that the driver should pull over.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
“He wouldn’t stop,” Dunlap said of the driver, whom she insists she had never met before. “He was running [traffic] lights. I was screaming, ‘What’s the matter with you? Just stop the car!’ ”
So the part-time preacher did the only thing she could think of, she says, to get the driver to stop: She flung the car door open.
The driver then jerked the car to a halt, leapt out and ran. The cops gave chase — leaving the terrified and confused Dunlap alone in the dead of night.
“I was standing in the street in the middle of the night,” she recalled.
Reluctant to walk home alone in the dark, Dunlap waited 20 or 30 minutes until more police officers arrived. That’s when they slapped handcuffs on her and threw her in the back of a squad car, claims Dunlap, who filed a $5 million lawsuit against the city and the NYPD.
“She’s a sweet, older, church-going woman — not exactly your normal denizen of the jail cells,” said her lawyer, Robert Tolchin.
The officers grilled her about the driver, refusing to believe she didn’t know him.
“They said, ‘Where’s the guy?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea!’ ” Dunlap said. “I said, ‘I waited for the officer, so why are you handcuffing me?’ ”
Dunlap was held at the precinct for hours without being charged with a crime, she alleges in her Brooklyn Federal Court lawsuit.
“When they finally let me go, they were apologizing,” she said. “I used to have a lot of faith in the NYPD. I think they need to be retrained. How they assess things — it’s just scary. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The city will review the allegations when it gets the court papers, a Law Department spokeswoman said.