I held off on sharing this story (last week) because I wanted to fact check the surrounding details.   After calling Milwakee County today, I can confirm all of the details inside this article.  Including the officer in question still being employed.

Summary:   Police Officer Joseph Quiles drove through a stop light and T-boned another vehicle belonging to 25-year-old Tanya Welker.   Ms. Welker was *seriously* injured.   Officer Quiles, with the help of other officers, fabricated an arrest report proclaiming Ms. Welker as Driving Under the Influence (DUI) and citing her responsible for the accident.  However, a CCTV video showed an entirely divergent set of facts……

(WISCONSIN) A Wisconsin woman says she was wrongly accused of driving drunk when a Milwaukee sheriff’s deputy T-boned her car last year, leaving her with serious injuries and a pile of medical bills.

Tanya Weyker, 25, a jewelery designer and blogger from Milwaukee, was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving in connection to a February 2013 accident involving Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Quiles – even though blood tests showed that she had no alcohol or drugs in her system.

The driver’s neck was broken in four places, leaving Weyker unable to perform a field sobriety test on the scene of the crash, or even blow into a Breathalyzer.

Prosecutors later declined to pursue charges against her, but the woman has spent the past year struggling to clear her name and force the county to pay her mounting medical bills, according to Fox6, which broke the story.

Deputy Quiles, who in the original accident report claimed that he came to a full stop right before the collision and saw no headlights in front of him, later admitted that he was the one who caused the crash.

However, the law enforcement agent was never held accountable for filing a false accident report. So far, his punishment has been limited to nine days’ suspension for minor transgressions.

On the night of February 20, 2013, Deputy Quiles was working the night shift at General Mitchell International Airport when he pulled onto Howell Avenue, smashing into the side of Tanya Weyker’s car and sending it flying into a tree.

‘It was a miracle I wasn’t paralyzed,’ Weyker recalled the harrowing moment.

As a toddler, Weyker was diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo chemotherapy, which curved her spine and required doctors to insert metal rods in her back to straighten it out. Now, the 25-year-old University of Wisconsin-Parkside student had four broken bones in her neck.

Weyker was too injured to submit to field sobriety tests, but that did not stop responding sheriff’s deputies from questioning her about her alcohol and drug consumption.

Weyker truthfully responded that she had a few sips from a friend’s drink earlier that night and had taken Vicodin a week earlier to help with the pain from a dental procedure.

The accident report stated that Weyker’s breath faintly smelled of alcohol, her eyes appeared red and glassy, and her speech was slurred.

In the end, Weyker was arrested on five DWI charges, including drunken driving causing injury.

In his report, Deputy Quiles wrote that he came to a full stop at the stop sign, looked both ways and saw no headlights – even though the lights on Weyker’s Toyota Camry turn on automatically.

But the law enforcement agent was later forced to amend his account of the accident when a surveillance video surfaced showing Quiles’ squad car rolling through the stop sign and into the side of Weyker’s Camry.

When questioned about the accident 10 months later, Quiles acknowledged to internal investigators that he was at fault for the accident because he did not come to a full stop.

 

Aside for his brief suspension for breaking traffic laws and damaging county property, Quiles has faced no disciplinary action for his falsified report.

‘I think he was trying to protect himself and his department,’ Weyker said.

Even though she had been cleared of any wrongdoing, Weyker is still waiting for the county to foot her medical bills, which her attorney Todd Korbs says could amount to $1 million.   (read more)