A Greensburg police officer said he immediately knew the man sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle pulled over during a February traffic stop wasn’t who he claimed to be.
Police said the man initially insisted he was an 11-year-old named Billy Irwin and gave multiple dates of birth. After a brief investigation, police ultimately learned the man before them was actually an 18-year-old runaway from an Oil City juvenile detention center facility and named Tristan Savidge.
According to court records, a uniformed officer stopped the silver Kia Optima for an alleged traffic violation shortly before 2 a.m. and found Savidge in the passenger’s seat and not wearing a seat belt. Savidge was ordered out of the vehicle after he claimed he carried no identification and said he was an 11-year-old boy.
His physical appearance, though, led police to another conclusion.
“Do you think the goatee wouldn’t have tipped them off,” Westmoreland County Judge Christopher Feliciani asked during a guilty plea hearing on Wednesday.
Savidge, who will turn 19 in October, pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge of giving false identification to police and was sentenced to serve up to 12 months in jail. The judge ordered Savidge to be immediately paroled after having served 74 days behind bars following his arrest.
