There’s nothing quite like the inconvenience of being in a fender bender about town. Whether it was your fault or not, there is the inevitable dealing with police, insurance companies, the other driver, etc etc.

And that’s honestly a best case scenario when everyone is telling the truth and doing the right thing.

OP’s family is Asian and living in a small and predominantly white town.

For some background, I live in a predominantly white suburban town in New Jersey and my family is Asian.

Although the town is alright for the most part, it is not really a secret that some of the townspeople are pretty racist. One of our neighbors, (let’s call him Anthony) is a retired police captain from another town, but he is friends with my town’s police chief.

My mother is a first-generation immigrant, and although she’s fluent in English, she still has a pretty thick Asian accent.

When a woman caused an accident with her mom, she immediately claimed it was OP’s mother’s fault.

A couple of years ago, my mom went to visit one of her friends on the other side of town. My mom had parallel parked directly in front of her friend’s house which is at the bottom of a small hill.

As she was leaving, a woman driving a Jeep Wrangler with her children was driving down the small hill, but she was still a decent distance back, so my mom pulled out of her spot.

The road they were on was really wide, with enough space to fit 5 cars next to one another, and about 40 feet ahead was a stop sign.

My mom at this point was already in the middle of the road fully out of the parking spot and had gotten about 10 feel when the woman driving the Jeep suddenly came up from behind my mom’s car and cut directly in front of her, crossing a double yellow line to do so.

Because of the angle she cut off my mom at, the Jeep’s rear-wheel ended up ripping off my mom’s front bumper.

My mom naturally immediately stopped, and the woman got out of her car after straightening it out on the road.

As soon as she stepped out of her car, this woman (we’ll call her Karen) immediately starts cursing my mom out at the top of her lungs.

Karen told my mom to call the police, but my mom told her that her phone had died. My mom’s friend and her son, as well as the neighbor, came out of the house after hearing the commotion to see what had happened.

The neighbor, an elderly man, asked what happened and Karen yelled “Are you f*cking blind? A f*cking accident happened! Go call the police! I need to call my boyfriend.”

When the police arrived, they didn’t even want to talk to her.

The son had taken a law class in college, so he offered to take a bunch of pictures of the scene of the accident and send them to my mom later (this becomes super important later).

The neighbor calls the police, but Karen’s boyfriend arrives at the scene first. When the cop (let’s call him Kenny) finally arrives, he asked my mom what happened, just as my mom had just started saying her side of the story, the cop says “Wait just a minute.” and walks over to the boyfriend.

As it turns out, the boyfriend (we’ll call him Sam) was a cop in the town who was pretty popular with the kids in the middle schools since he would occasionally visit to talk about things like DARE and other things in assemblies.

Sam was off duty at the time, so he was able to come over when Karen called him. As soon as Kenny saw his bud Sam, he immediately went to go talk with him rather than with my mom or with Karen.

They discuss for a little while and afterward sent everyone on their way.

My mom tried to talk to Kenny before he left, but Kenny just brushed it off and said he got the details he needed and that my mom would be able to get the police report in about a week or two.

Luckily, a good samaritan was on hand to take photographs that really came in handy.

When my mom receives the police report, she saw that it said that she pulled out without using her blinkers suddenly and hit Karen’s car. On top of that, Karen was expecting for my mom’s insurance to pay for the damage done to her rear wheel.

My mom went to my neighbor Anthony to ask what she should do about the report since it was clearly wrong. Anthony was furious and told her that she should go to the police station and ask to see the chief and if they ask why she needs to see him she should tell them that it’s because she wants to file an internal complaint.

That day, my mom takes the photographs sent to her by the son and goes to the police station and asks the person working the front desk to see the chief.

The cop says that she could not just walk in and ask for the chief, so my mom responds “Ok, so where should I go to file an internal complaint?” and the cop immediately straightens up and says, “Right here. Come with me.”

He leads her into the back. The Deputy Chief steps into the room and started recording the conversation. Since the chief was out, my mom presented all of the evidence to him instead.

After presenting the evidence to show that it was in fact Karen that hit her instead of the other way around, my mom also says that she would like to file a corruption complaint against both Kenny and Sam.

Kenny clearly did not do his job properly since he did not properly ask the actual people involved in the accident and did not even note the fact that there were 2 passengers in Karen’s car in the report. (Even Karen later admitted to an investigator that Kenny never once spoke to her).

My mom even threw in the racist card for good measure saying maybe Kenny wouldn’t listen to her and brushed her off because of her thick Asian accent.

Sam meanwhile had interfered with the investigation despite not being at the scene of the crime during the time of the accident.

The Deputy Chief says he will start an internal investigation and will see if anything needs to be done.

Even though OP’s mom straightened things out with the insurance companies, the other woman wasn’t done with the court system.

Meanwhile, my mom also filed a claim to her insurance and presented the evidence to them too, and her insurance decides since the accident (in their eyes) was clearly not her fault, they weren’t going to pay Karen a penny and that they would contact Karen’s insurance to pay my mom instead.

A lot of internal bureaucratic investigational bullsh*t happens including interviews with Karen, my mom’s friend, and the friend’s neighbor.

About a month passed and an officer comes to our house to tell my mom that Kenny had been punished (but there was not enough evidence to punish Sam) and he just wanted to know if there were any other concerns she had.

Since Karen seemingly had not done anything to further warrant any action and the damage to the car was paid for, my mom said that there was nothing else.

This is the fun part. Three days after the officer came to our door, a letter came in the mail for a court hearing. Turns out, Karen decided to file three tickets about my mom just ONE DAY before the statute of limitations.

Apparently, in NJ, citizens are allowed to file complaints about other citizens breaking the law (a thing that our family had never heard of before until this happened) and because of how late she filed these complaints, by the time we received them in the mail, we could not even counter complain and the only options were to pay the fine or to go to court.

Except she was, because OP’s mom beat her there, too.

We assumed that Karen learned about being able to file a complaint from Sam (because no s—), and that the only reason she was willing to go this far is because she heard my mom had a super thick Asian accent and assumed that my mom wouldn’t know what to do about the tickets and would just pay up.

What she didn’t count on was the fact that my mom is actually really aggressive with an absolutely massive network of people that she knows.

Within a day, my mom hired a lawyer to fight the case and they immediately asked to change the court from the small court in our town to one of the large courts a couple of towns away.

The logic was that if she fought the case in our town, my mom would be at a disadvantage since her case was essentially going against our town’s beloved police force, but by putting it in a different town, the playing field would be even.

Additionally, while my mom worked from home in her own business, Karen had a full-time job in town, so going to court in a different town would be a huge pain in the ass for her.

The lawyer had prepared a huge amount of evidence against Karen, so there was no way she was actually going to win the case no matter what.

Come the court date, Karen never showed up, so the case was thrown out.

Oh, and now everyone in town knows the other woman (and her boyfriend) are awful.

That was a pretty nice win, but what came after was even better. Since my mother and sister have a lot of friends in town, the story of Karen and Sam doing this shady bullcrap got out really fast.

Soon, half the town had heard about it, and suddenly Karen and Sam went from two favorites in the town because of Sam’s reputation to two of the most underhanded and nasty people.

Sam stopped getting invited to school assemblies and Karen was ostracized in her kids’ school’s PTA.

Anthony also ended up talking to the police chief in private and we found out that although Sam was not officially punished, he was severely reprimanded by the Chief.

Everyone wins, right?

The top comment says this was very well played.

They’re hoping the insurance company got some revenge in, too.

Maybe OP’s mom could have counter-sued.

Because there was definitely slander involved.

After all, this must have all been stressful!

People like this lady deserve everything they get.

Just do the right thing! It’s honestly not that hard…

If you thought that was an interesting read, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.