Toddler Crashes Jeep, Runs Home to Watch Cartoons

Another reason toddlers need guardians: A 3-year-old in Myrtle Creek, Oregon, climbed into his aunt's Jeep Wrangler on Tuesday night and drove it through an intersection into a house, KPTV reports. Earlier on, a police officer had spotted the boy playing by himself in the parked Jeep and woke up a relative in his house, 22-year-old Brennan Pennington, to say that the child had been in the vehicle with the keys. The officer left, and a half hour later, police got a call about the crash.

Investigators say the boy knocked the Jeep out of gear before driving it along the 300 block of Northwest Second Street, onto a curb, across a lawn, and into the side of a house. The boy then ran home in his diaper to watch cartoons—which is where an officer found him "as if nothing had ever happened." The boy's aunt called it an accident, saying the Jeep was parked on an incline (where the boy apparently popped it into neutral and coasted down the street). The family reached a "civil compromise" with the owner of the damaged house, police say, and Pennington was charged with failure to supervise a child. (More Jeep stories.)