Home » Courts » Woman charged with car theft

Woman charged with car theft

After sharing a ride to work, a woman is accused of driving off in her friend’s van and damaging it while drunk.

Tiffany T. Socha, 23, Tigerton, is charged with operating a vehicle without the owner’s consent and misdemeanor theft.

Shortly before 5 a.m. Thursday, July 30, Clintonville Police Officers Dennis Finger and Matthew Wright responded to a call from Deluxe Plastics.

When they arrived, the officers saw a van in the parking lot with two women standing beside it.

One of the women was the van’s owner, while the other one, identified as Socha, was leading against the van and appeared intoxicated, according to the criminal complaint.

The van’s owner told Wright that she had picked up Socha shortly after 11:30 p.m. in Tigerton to give her a ride to work. Their shift began at 12:15 a.m.

They had both started working at the plant a few weeks earlier.

She suspected something was wrong but Socha said she was just extremely tired. At the plant, Socha asked her supervisor for an unpaid day off. The driver then gave Socha her keys so that she could sleep inside the van.

Socha’s boss told police that Socha came into the plant at about 4 a.m. She seemed drunk, so the supervisor escorted her to the van and told her not to come inside, the complaint says.

A short time later, Socha returned to the plant and said she needed to talk to the van’s owner because she had locked the keys inside the vehicle.

The van’s owner called her fiance, who then drove from Marion to Clintonville with a spare set of keys.

When the owner went out to her van she noticed that it had been moved and damaged. The driver’s side headlight was loose, the driver’s side quarter panel was dented, there was damage to the running boards, a reddish-gray paint transfer on the driver’s side door and rear bumper and dirt and grass on the front bumper and in the rims of the front tires.

She also discovered that a quarter of a tank of gas had been used since she arrived at work.

Scroll to Top