One eight-year-old girl from Ohio had the time of her life for about a half hour on Sunday, September 15 when she got behind the wheel of the family SUV and made her way to a Target department store.
The unnamed girl climbed into her family’s Nissan Rogue parked in the driveway of their Bedford, Ohio house, carrying $400 in cash for her shopping spree. The girl’s parents discovered she was missing at 7 a.m. that morning. No one in the family has been named or identified. Her parents panicked and reported her disappearance to the police. A little while later, a neighbor’s doorbell camera was discovered to have recorded the girl getting into the truck and driving away.
Police found the girl after she got to the Target in the town of Bainbridge.
Other drivers on the road noticed the youngster weaving in and out of lanes and called 911 to report the child driver. One motorist recorded the girl’s actions on a dashboard camera as the girl swerved into their lane and nearly hit them. It turns out that the driver recording the girl was calling the police at the same time that her parents were still wondering where she’d gone to. The video can be viewed here.
An automatic license-plate-reading camera helped cops narrow down the girl’s location when it found the family Nissan on Pettibone Road. When police drove to Target they found the SUV parked there, but the little miss was already inside the store to do her shopping. That $400 in cash she took? The girl spent it all, but there’s no word on exactly what she bought.
When the cops caught up with her, the girl admitted that she had driven through someone’s mailbox on the side of the street. Thankfully, no one was hurt throughout the incident.
While the Bedford Police Department would not tell media whether any charges would be filed against the girl, their lighthearted post on Facebook suggests they probably will not. The Department wrote that a little girl had taken “mommy’s car” for a shopping trip, and while cops were not sure what she bought, they did let her finish her fancy coffee drink because “we’re not mean.”
