9-year-old girl driving her 4-year-old sister crashes into semitruck

A 9-year-old girl who was trying to drive her 4-year-old sister to California this week crashed into a semitruck. 

The West Valley City Police Department in Utah shared on Twitter that officers “got quite a surprise” after responding to an accident early Wednesday morning and discovering that the 9-year-old was driving a vehicle that slammed into a semitruck.  

The girl and her 4-year-old sister “snagged the keys to the family car while their parents were sleeping & set out on their own summer adventure,” police explained on Twitter.

Body camera footage shows a police officer approaching the crash. Officers can be heard saying “It’s crazy” and asking in disbelief “She’s driving?”

Officers got quite a surprise when they responded to an accident this morning & discovered the driver was a 9yo girl. The young girl & her 4yo sister apparently snagged the keys to the family car while their parents were sleeping & set out on their own summer adventure. #wvc pic.twitter.com/evHq3DiBRC

— WVC Police (@WVCPD) June 2, 2021

The girls got approximately 10 miles from their home before “hopping a median and slamming head-on into a semi truck,” police said. 

The vehicle the girls were driving sustained “serious damage,” and the truck had to be towed from the scene.

Police confirmed that nobody was hurt in the accident, noting that the girls did remember to put on their seatbelts.  

“So, what prompted this impromptu trip? The girls told officers that they were headed to California because they wanted to ‘swim in the ocean,’” the department shared on Twitter.

The girls’ parents did not know that they had taken the car until police went to their home on Wednesday.

The driver of the semitruck saw the girls in the vehicle driving erratically before the crash and tried to report the license plate number, ABC4 in Utah reported.

Detective Scott List with the West Jordan Police Department told the outlet that “The parents are horrified and shocked, they didn’t know that their kids were gone.”

“It doesn’t look like this is a neglect issue,” List added. “It looks like this is something that could have happened to anybody. We’ve got some curious kids who were excited about swimming with dolphins in California and figured out how to drive the car.”