On June 18, a Tampa woman, Joneshia Wilkerson, claimed that she had been harassed by police after she was stopped while driving a stolen car. On Tuesday, she was arrested for failing to return a leased vehicle, which she had rented using a stolen credit card.
The incident started when a Tampa police officer conducted a high-risk traffic stop on the 23-year-old after the car was reported stolen, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
The officer then called for backup and held his weapon at low ready as he waited behind the driver’s door.
Wilkerson made an Instagram video of the stop, and complied with the officer’s orders. In the video, she claimed that the officer pointed the gun at her head.
“I told him numerous times I can get out the car and I’m not arm yet he still pointed his gun at me I was scared and in fear with my life … ” the video was captioned.
The video, which Wilkerson has since deleted from Instagram, went viral and sparked outraged in the Tampa area.
She was detained and then quickly released after she claimed that she had borrowed the car from a friend, who she said was financing the car and had failed to make payments.
However, surveillance video from the Hertz car rental station at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport showed that Wilkerson used a stolen credit card on July 2 to rent the black Nissan Altima.
She failed to return it on June 6, and when Hertz tried to contact her, they discovered that the phone number was bogus and the credit card was stolen.
On June 18, Hertz filed a stolen vehicle report with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, and that was when Tampa police spotted the car later the same day.
Pinellas County Detectives found that Wilkerson had used a friend’s driver’s license and the same bogus phone number she later gave to police on the rental forms. According to the Tampa Patch, she had paid her friend $200 to use the license.
The credit card number used by Wilkerson was stolen from an Indiana woman who still had the card in her possession.
The video showed that the officer spoke nicely to both Wilkerson and her passenger, and that the women were cooperative.
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