Traffic agent issues ticket to Queens man who's already dead, no one realizes until hour later

A Queens man was slapped with a parking ticket as he lay dead in the driver's seat of his car, cops and family said Wednesday.

Nicholas Rappold, 21, of Flushing, was slumped across the front seat of his Jeep Cherokee on 165th St. near 35thAve. Tuesday morning when a traffic agent wrote him up for being illegally parked during street sweeping, cops and family said.

"It's really messed up," the young man's cousin Patrick Hill told the Daily News. "While he was dead in his car, a New York City traffic agent gave him a ticket."

An hour after the ticket was issued, a friend whose house Rappold had left in the middle of the night spotted his buddy's vehicle still parked outside, sources said.

The curious pal went to see why the SUV was still there and found Rappold's cold body, sources said.

Investigators interviewed the traffic agent but found no wrongdoing. "He had heavily tinted windows," a police source said in defense of the postmortem ticket. "It was hard to see inside."

But family argued that the officer could have seen Rappold, who had recently been in rehab for pill abuse.

"She could have at least knocked on the window to see if he was all right," Hill said.

The cause of death is still to be determined by the medical examiner, but investigators believe Rappold died hours before the ticketing from an overdose.

Police voided the parking summons after they released the vehicle to the family.