Man Collapses Waiting In Line At Eatontown MVC

EATONTOWN, NJ — A man collapsed while waiting outdoors in a more-than-2-hour line at the Eatontown Motor Vehicle Commission Monday morning.

The incident was witnessed by Little Silver Councilman AJ McNally, who said he started waiting in line at the Eatontown location at about 6:30 a.m. Monday, so his daughter could take her driver's license exam.

"The guy was about 10 people ahead of me, so he had to have gotten there around 6 a.m. or earlier," said McNally. "And he collapsed a little before 8:30 a.m. He looked like an elderly gentleman. He just collapsed. It looked like he had a bruise on his forehead and there was blood on his mask so yeah, it did look like he hit his face. Police had him in a chair and were taking care of him when I walked by."

McNally said he was actually taking photos "of how atrocious the lines were" when the man suddenly went down. EMS was called and the man was taken away by ambulance, he said.

A spokesman for the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission said they are aware of the man collapsing, but had no further comment on that particular incident.

The New Jersey MVC has been notorious for long lines since reopening in July, but Monday morning was particularly bad, when their entire computer system was hit by a network outage that lasted more than four hours, officials said.

"A vendor software issue caused interruption of network connections at all MVC agencies (Monday), preventing the processing of transactions," said MVC spokesman William Connolly. "The outage was first reported around 9 a.m. Online transactions were not affected."

He said IT worked to fix the problem, and service was restored by about 1 p.m. Monday.

McNally said he and his daughter got in to take her test at about 9 a.m, so their entire wait was just short of three hours.

"The staff is very nice, walking up and down, telling us how long it will take," he said. "They are doing the best they can. But I would say there is definitely something wrong when you have that many people standing outside a facility. I'm not sure why they are having such troubles. And the weather is warm now. What happens when it starts getting really cold in October and November?"

He stressed he did not know what exactly caused the man to collapse.

"The last time I went to the MVC it was a few years ago and it was smooth as silk," he continued. "But now we've had people standing outside the facilities since July when they reopened, and now it's September 21. It begs the question as to what is wrong? And I'm not complaining about me having to wait three hours. I don't want businesses to not be able to register their cars; people who don't have four to five hours to wait. And I don't want senior citizens to have to wait. Look at what happened today."