13-year-old drives drunken parents home

Parents in Texas have been charged with child endangerment after having their 13-year-old daughter drive them home from a club.

Alvaro Benitez and Araceli Mata-Ortiz were arrested in Austin last weekend after police stopped their vehicle and found the couple’s daughter behind the wheel.

They were travelling as passengers with their other child aged 7.

The police were originally called to respond to reports of a car weaving between lanes and driving around 25mph under the 70mph speed limit. The girl also had a number of near misses, according to Yahoo Parenting.

Having spent the evening at a “family club” the 13-year-old saw that her parents were too drunk and suggested that she took the wheel. Her parents agreed and said it would be ‘a little adventure’.

After stopping the vehicle an open can of cold beer was found in the car. The affidavit also says ‘Alvaro and Araceli’s actions intentionally and knowingly put their two daughters in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical impairment’.

According to the Austin American-Statesman the girl’s father, Alvaro Benitez, has been convicted of driving while intoxicated twice before, in 1990 and 1991, and was charged with another offence in 2005.

But this is not the first case of its kind. A father was arrested in October 2011 after making his nine-year-old son his ‘designated driver’.

Nathan Sikkenga told his son to drive them back to their hotel after drinking during a family trip to Disney World in Florida. Police were called to that incident after the boy crashed into a security barrier at the Sheraton Vistana Resort.

Mr Sikkenga told police that he and his wife were too drunk to drive their minivan and told the boy to drive them back.

A second man was arrested in the same month after he had his nine-year-old daughter drive him to a convenience store because he had been drinking.