Crook steals Senate transportation chair’s license plate

If you see a white Yukon with the license plate FREDOM2, it’s not Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Mike Petersen anymore.

A thief stole Petersen’s personalized plate and put it on a nearly identical vehicle, apparently trying to fool any police who might run a plate check.

“Friday I was down at the Y and saw it,” said Petersen, R-Wichita. “I tried to catch up with him, but I got caught up in traffic.”

It was actually the second sighting of the stolen plate. Petersen said a friend caught up to the car on Wednesday and waved at the driver, thinking it was Petersen’s son.

Petersen speculated that the car now sporting his license plate may be either a stolen vehicle or wanted for some other reason by police.

Car thieves and fugitives will switch plates with an unsuspecting motorist if they know police are searching for a vehicle with a particular license number, he said.

With ordinary plates, it’s hard to spot because most drivers don’t regularly look at their license plate and many don’t have the number memorized, he said.

Petersen said his wife had her plate switched about 10 years ago and didn’t find out until she got pulled over by police with their guns drawn.

However, he said “it’s crazy taking a personalized plate,” because an owner probably would notice that. He said the value of his plate as crime cover is minimal because he called it in as stolen as soon as he noticed it missing last week.

Petersen will have to pay $7 for a replacement plate, which will be a standard nonpersonalized plate, said Sedgwick County tag office manager Tammy Antonelli.

He won’t be able to get his personalized plate number back until 2020, when the state next changes the license plate style, she said.

The thief didn’t leave a replacement plate on Petersen’s car, and Petersen said he may have been scared off by a neighbor before he could complete the switch.

“My neighbor told me he’d heard something about 2:30 in the morning and went out and didn’t see anything,” Petersen said. “And so he went back to bed and never even said anything to me until I was telling him about my tag being missing.”

This story was originally published November 28, 2017 at 3:41 PM with the headline "Crook steals Senate transportation chair’s license plate."