Twin towers hoax woman gets three years

A woman who set off a frantic and fruitless search for survivors when she said her husband had called her from under the destroyed World Trade Centre has been jailed for three years.

Sugeil Mejia, 24, of Union City, New Jersey, was sentenced yesterday on her guilty plea to reckless endangerment. She had faced up to seven years if convicted after trial, but now she will be eligible for parole after she serves one year.

Assistant District Attorney Richard White said that in exchange for Mejia’s plea, his office agreed not to prosecute her for credit card fraud. He said the man’s name she used when making her false report was the name on a credit card that she had obtained without permission.

White also said he appreciated not having to call police officers to testify.

‘‘Many officers broke down in tears in the grand jury,’’ he said. ‘‘It would have been difficult to have them relive this incident.’’

Mejia’s lawyer, Eugene Byrne, said his client had asked him ‘‘to extend her sincerest apologies to the firefighters and police officers who perished, and also to the civilians’’.

Outside court, Byrne said Mejia had lost a friend, brokerage employee Maribel Garcia, in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and therefore was not rational when she carried out the hoax.

Mejia, the mother of two children, was arrested on September 14 several hours after her story unravelled and she admitted she had made it up.

It began when she told Police Officer Ian Sinclair in St Vincent’s Hospital that she was a nurse and her husband was a Port Authority police officer who was trapped with 10 other officers beneath the World Trade Centre’s rubble. She said he was calling her on his mobile phone.

Sinclair reported that he drove Mejia, who was wearing hospital scrub clothes, and two hospital employees down to ground zero.

On the way there, Sinclair reported, Mejia’s mobile phone rang and she answered it, saying, ‘‘Yes, honey. We’re on the way. I can hardly hear you.’’ She told Sinclair her husband was under Tower One.

White said Mejia reported that her husband was trapped with five Port Authority and five New York City police officers.

When Mejia was questioned at the Sixth Precinct, her story unravelled and she admitted she had fabricated the entire report, court papers say.

Mejia admitted she was not a nurse, was not married to a police officer, did not know anyone trapped under the rubble, had not received calls from anyone in the area, and that her claims were based on her desire to be near ground zero.