On May 13 at 1:15 p.m., Officer Christian Medina was flagged down at Midland and Schuyler avenues by a man reporting his mother’s BMW X5 SUV was stolen from Midland Avenue and Devon Street. The complainant reported he had the BMW’s key fob in his possession and his mother, the registered owner of the BMW, was away in Miami. The man also said his wallet and identification were in the SUV when it was stolen.
Officer Medina returned to the police station to investigate further before entering the car in the nationwide stolen vehicle database. The officer found that the phone number given to him by the complainant did not work and the number the complainant gave as his mother’s was answered by the voicemail of an unrelated person.
Officer Medina went to the Kearny residence where the complainant was staying and a woman there got him on the phone, wherein he provided a different phone number for his mother. This number, the officer later found, was answered by a man in Texas who reported it as a wrong number.
Finally, just before 6 p.m., the complainant called police dispatch and reported the whole affair had been a prank. Reportedly, the complainant’s sister had been filming his interaction with the police to post it to Youtube and other social media video platforms.
Then, as karma would have it, on June 29 at 7:20 a.m., Officer Medina was dispatched to check on a man sleeping on the sidewalk on Midland Avenue. Low and behold, he recognized the sidewalk sleeper as the man who had falsely reported the stolen SUV. The man provided a Portuguese passport identifying him as 26-year-old Michel Eduardo Da Silva Moreira, which was not the name he claimed to have on May 13. Da Silva Moreira also had a different date of birth than he previously gave to the police, and an arrest warrant from Robbinsville Court for a traffic offense.
Da Silva Moreira was arrested and charged with false reports to law enforcement based on the May 13 incident. He was later released with a summons when Robbinsville authorities gave him a new court date for their charge.
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Capt. Timothy Wagner | Kearny Police Department
Capt. Timothy Wagner is the Kearny Police Department's public-information officer and the commander of the department's Internal Affairs Unit. He contributes the KPD Blotter weekly and writes it completely.