July 21, 2009
Gary Davidson
Public Information Officer

DEPUTIES ARREST WOMAN FOR MAKING PHONY CARJACKING REPORT

A distraught 23-year-old Daytona Beach woman touched off a search for a gunman early Tuesday morning after calling 911 to report that she had been robbed and carjacked. Danielle Olsen, however, quickly went from victim to defendant after Volusia County Sheriff’s deputies discovered that she made up the tale to cover up the fact that she was behind on her car payments and had intentionally wrecked her vehicle to avoid having it repossessed by the finance company.

The saga began at about 12:10 a.m., when a resident called the Sheriff’s Office to report an abandoned vehicle upside down in a ditch on the side of 10^th Street near Daytona Beach. Two deputies and a Holly Hill police officer responded to the site of the crashed vehicle, which came back as registered to Olsen. The Sheriff’s Office also dispatched rescue units just in case anyone had been injured in the wreck. About 11 minutes later, a woman called 911 from a residence on Granada Avenue in Daytona Beach to report that while at a gas station waiting for a friend, a man with a gun threatened to shoot her and took her car. “I was terrified,” the caller told the Sheriff’s Office dispatcher. “I don’t know where my car is. He took all of my money and my car is gone.”

The caller claimed that a man she was meeting at the gas station showed up right after the carjacking, and she jumped into his car and they tried to follow the fleeing suspect. The woman, however, said the car she was in broke down and so they ran to her ex-husband’s house on Granada Avenue to report the robbery. That call prompted additional patrol deputies, a K-9 unit and several Daytona Beach officers to respond to the area and launch a search for the suspect. However, as Olsen repeated her story to responding deputies, they were immediately suspicious that the victim ran to a house instead of using her cell phone to report the alleged crime. When deputies separated Olsen and her male friend to interview them, their stories didn’t match up. That’s when they fessed up that Olsen had concocted the story because she was behind in her car payments and the finance company was trying to repossess the vehicle. The final piece of evidence, a metal rod used to hold down the accelerator so it would crash into the ditch, was recovered from inside the car. Deputies called off the search for the imaginary carjacker and arrested Olsen on a misdemeanor charge of filing a false report of a crime. The Florida Highway Patrol was called in to investigate the crash and cited Olsen for careless driving and leaving the scene of a crash with damage. Olsen was booked into the Volusia County Branch Jail in Daytona Beach on $1,000 bond.