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Miami-Dade Police officer Sandra Lyles was just days away from retirement. All she had to do to make it out of the force quietly was keep a low profile. Instead, she was snapped by an angry citizen using her county-issued police car as an impromptu personal mattress transporter and has now been relieved of duty.
Some surely crabby viewer of Local10 saw Lyles in a Big Lots parking lot off of the Palmetto Expressway strapping the mattresses to the top of her car. Miami-Dade officers are allowed to use their patrol cars for personal use, but apparently strapping a mattress on top is a bit too far.
If this was the only smudge on Lyles’ record we’d probably consider the uproar a little over-the-top, but according to Local10 her record is far from squeaky clean:
According to personal records, Lyles is not a model officer. In 1990, she was taken off the streets and assigned as a secretary and has been suspended twice for being in “preventable” crashes with her patrol car.
Records show that Lyles has been disciplined 19 times in her career, several involving conduct-related issues.
According to records in December of 2007, Lyles received discipline for conducting private business on the job and in 2003 she was reprimanded for “parking a marked vehicle police vehicle in a location designed for handicapped access.”
So Miami-Dade cops, if you’re going to transport a mattress using your car, make sure its one of those blow up kinds that you can put in your trunk.
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