- A video circulating online shows a young boy sitting on an adult’s lap behind the wheel of a moving car on a busy Southern California freeway, without a car seat or seatbelt.
There are bad ideas, and then there are ideas so spectacularly misguided that they end up captured on video and shared with the entire internet. A clip making the rounds this week falls firmly into the second category: footage showing a young boy sitting on an adult’s lap behind the wheel of a moving car on a busy Southern California freeway, apparently steering the vehicle while traveling at highway speed. No car seat. No seatbelt. Just a kid gripping a steering wheel at 65 miles per hour while other drivers tried to make sense of what they were looking at.
The footage was captured and shared by OC Hawk, a news video stringer service, and shows an adult driver heading eastbound on the 60 Freeway in Riverside County with a child seated on his lap. The incident occurred around 7 p.m. on June 9. It was broad daylight, on a major freeway corridor, in full view of surrounding traffic. Which is, frankly, exactly how something like this gets documented.
In the video, the child appears to be holding the steering wheel and is not wearing a seatbelt. A front-seat passenger is also visible inside the vehicle. So there were enough adults present that someone could have, at any point, suggested that this was perhaps not a sound plan. That did not happen…