Florida Mother Arrested for DUI After Officer Sees 5-Year-Old Hanging From Car Window

Leaving a kid’s birthday party usually means surviving sugar rushes, plastic goodie bags, and pure exhaustion. For one South Florida mother, it also meant a roadside sobriety test and a pair of handcuffs.

Isabella Fernanda Saenz, 26, now faces charges of driving under the influence and child neglect after Pembroke Pines police spotted her car carrying a rather unusual passenger setup on Sunday night.

According to an arrest affidavit, an officer sitting at the corner of North Flamingo Road and Sheridan Street glanced at a red light and saw a 5-year-old girl hanging halfway out of the rear passenger window. The child’s upper half floated entirely in the Florida breeze, and things didn’t improve when the light turned green,the car simply drove off with the girl still leaning out into traffic.

Saenz then drifted from the turn lane across a solid white line, prompting the officer to flip on the blue lights and end the open-air ride.

When the officer approached, Saenz claimed she had no idea her daughter had slipped out of her seatbelt, let alone turned the backseat window into a viewing deck. The officer quickly picked up on a few classic warning signs: glassy eyes and a strong whiff of alcohol.

Saenz explained she was simply driving home from a children’s party. She later admitted to smoking marijuana and having what she described as “one margarita”,though her subsequent breath tests told a slightly more festive story.

Roadside field sobriety tests did not go well, with officers noting Saenz wobbled on her feet and struggled with basic instructions. A breathalyzer later clocked her blood-alcohol level at 0.123 and 0.124 percent, well above Florida’s 0.08 legal limit.

In the report, police dryly noted that failing to notice a child dangling out of a moving vehicle carried a “substantial risk of death or serious physical injury.”

Saenz booked into the Broward County Jail and has since bonded out for $8,000, leaving her with plenty of time to rethink both her commute and the backseat child-lock settings before her next court date.