No mercy for priest with parking ticket

NEW YORK - The city is showing no mercy to a priest who got a $115 ticket for parking in an ambulance zone while ministering to an ailing hospital patient.

Two months after ticketing the Rev. Cletus Forson of St. Andrew the Apostle Church in Brooklyn, the city has thrown out his appeal.

"It's just a disappointment," said Forson, who got hit with the ticket July 26 outside Maimonides Medical Center. "I was attending someone who was in a debilitated state who needed attention."

Though Appeals Board Judges Irwin Strum and Diane Pine wrote they "accept" Forson was filling a "religious obligation," they ruled he still broke the law by parking in an ambulance zone.

The silver lining is that readers who learned about the ticket from the Daily News, where the story first appeared, and from an Associated Press story mailed cards, letters and nearly $1,500.

"I was very surprised," Monsignor Guy Massie, pastor of St. Andrew's, said Wednesday. "People are responding to their own frustration with the Bureau of Traffic Violations."

Massie said he would donate the money to charity.