Sunday, April 14, 2013

Six Is Not The New Sixteen

While everyone is aware of the peril of elderly drivers, there's now the far more rare peril of child drivers:

The Detroit News: Lapeer Police stop 6-year-old driver heading for Chinese food

Apparently he misheard sixteen as six as the legal driving age.

Police in Lapeer responded to an unusual phone call Saturday morning from drivers on M-24 who reported a vehicle driving erratically.

"They told police when they called that it looked like a 6-year-old was driving the car," said Sgt. Andy Engster of the Lapeer County Sheriff's Department. "And they were exactly right."

By the time police arrived to pull over the six-year-old boy, two drivers of other vehicles had already boxed him into a turnaround, said Engster. One reached into the window and pulled the keys out of the ignition.

The boy had taken the keys off the counter at home and told the responding officer that he had never driven before and nobody had taught him how.

"He said he'd never even sat on his dad's lap to steer the car or anything," said Engster.

When police asked the boy why he took the car, he told them he was going to get Chinese food. He had hit a "no left turn" sign on Park and Pine streets near his home and, seeing the damage to the car, decided he needed to head to the dealer to get it repaired.

Quite a responsible kid to head to the repair shop after banging up his dad's car on the way to buy dinner. Responsible, or he figured he could get it fixed and returned before he had to explain what had happened. How he was going to pay for it would be an interesting question.

3 comments:

Expatriate Owl said...

On the Binet scale, this kid seems to be towards the righthand side of the bell curve (though I.Q. does not necessarily correlate with common sense).

If he is able to pick up the keys from the counter, then he should be able to get hold of Daddy's MasterCard without too much additional practice.

Aaron said...

Yep, one has to applaud the kid's initiative, if not his lack of driving skills.

Probably he might have snatched the card, but I wonder if the shops would have had some questions about a kid paying with a credit card without a parent present.

Expatriate Owl said...

No problem! Some boneheaded cashier at the local 7-Eleven accepted a credit card (ME & MY WIFE'S credit card) from our son when he was 8 years old. $6 for some little plastic tzatzkeh toy!

But that's the kind of story we, some day hopefully, will threaten to tell tell to his wife or his fiancee if he doesn't behave himself.