2 Sibley Students Charged with Selling Phony School Parking Passes

Two St. Paul teenagers are facing forgery charges after police say they created fraudulent parking passes and sold them to classmates during the 2010-11 school year at Henry Sibley High School in Mendota Heights.

Andre Charles Oliver, 18, and Nicholas Charles Ritter, 18, are charged with felony aggravated forgery, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine. Both were seniors at Sibley during the 2010-11 school year.

School officials—who could not be reached for comment—estimated the loss to the school for the second semester at $1,500. There was no loss figure available for the first semester.

According to the criminal complaints, a Mendota Heights police officer working as Sibley’s school resource officer began investigating a report of fraudulent parking passes in late January.

Several students told school administrators that at least one student was making the passes and selling them to other students for much less than the $125 that the school charges per semester.

Administrators identified one of the students responsible for the passes as Ritter, the complaints say.

The school uses different colors for its parking passes per semester, and each pass is printed with an identification number. Students with passes are required to hang them from a vehicle’s rear-view mirror.

The passes are made by a third-party vendor, according to court records.

The school resource officer identified 13 vehicles in the school parking lot with what appeared to be phony parking passes. The color of the fraudulent tags was not identical to the color of the genuine tags, and all of the fraudulent tags bore the same identification number: 566.

A subsequent investigation found that parking pass 566 had been issued to Ritter, according to the complaints.

In early March, the school resource officer and Sibley’s associate principal interviewed students who were using fraudulent passes. Eight students said they had bought the passes from Oliver, and two said they had bought them from Ritter, according to the complaint. An 11th student said he found the pass on a hallway floor.

All but one of the interviewed students knew that the passes were phony, according to the complaints, and most said they had purchased the passes because they couldn’t afford to pay $125 per semester for a genuine pass.

The officer subsequently interviewed Oliver, who admitted that he and Ritter had bought real parking passes from the school for the first and second semesters, then decided to make copies of them, laminate them and sell them to students, according to the complaints.

Oliver said he and Ritter had sold the fake passes during the first and second semesters to about 15 students for $50 each, though not everyone paid that amount.

The school resource officer later spoke to Ritter, who said he had given his pass to Oliver and that he had made copies of it, according to the complaints.

“Ritter reported that he had no part in making the parking passes, distributing the parking passes or selling the parking passes,” the complaints say. “Ritter then told the officer that the officer ‘had nothing on him.’”