Florida Mom Arrested For DUI After Officer Spots 5-Year-Old Dangling From Car Window

— Florida Mom Busted For DUI After Cop Spots 5-Year-Old Daughter Dangling Out Car Window —

Leaving a kid’s birthday party is usually an exercise in surviving sugar rushes, plastic goodie bags, and exhaustion. For one South Florida mother, it also involved an impromptu roadside sobriety test and a pair of handcuffs.

Isabella Fernanda Saenz, 26, is facing charges of driving under the influence and child neglect after Pembroke Pines police noticed her car had 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 looked over at a red light and saw a 5-year-old girl hanging halfway out of the rear passenger window. The child’s upper half was 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 turn on the blue lights and end the open-air ride.

When approached, Saenz said she had no clue 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 was 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.