A deputy with the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office in Florida wrote up three teens and a 12-year-old boy for street racing this week.
The incident came Tuesday, when the deputy stopped two cars, a Nissan driven by the 12-year-old and a Toyota Corolla steered by a 17-year-old boy, purportedly approaching a patrol car side by side at high speed.
“What was that racing [expletive]?” the sheriff’s deputy asked the 17-year-old upon stopping him, as caught on body camera footage shared online by VSO Friday.
While the 17-year-old was driving his mother’s car, the 12-year-old was steering the car owned by the mom of one of the 16-year-olds in the passenger seat.
The mother of the 12-year-old told the deputy, once she arrived, that her son should be slapped. The deputy responded that, while he obviously couldn’t do that, “that’s your child. Corporal punishment is completely legal.”
In addition to the 12-year-old being written a citation for not having a license and both he and the 17-year-old cited for racing, both 16-year-olds were written up for knowingly riding as passengers during a race, according to Orlando’s WOFL.
The grandmother of the 12-year-old, who did not provide her name, told the TV station that “people might think it’s funny, but at the end of the day, we could be burying about four or five kids. … It could have been really worse.”
The suspects were not taken to jail but will have to appear in court.
