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Boy, 8, takes mom's car for a spin

Deputies ticketed Kobie Stires for driving without a license. He is due in court Oct. 4.

By JONATHAN ABEL
Published August 31, 2006

BROOKSVILLE — Kobie Stires got his first traffic ticket Thursday — at the age of 8.

Barefoot and sporting a blue polo shirt with gray camouflage shorts, the deaf boy woke up before his mother, liberated some car keys from her purse and took her 1999 Dodge Intrepid for a spin on the streets of Hernando County.

He drove like a mouse in a maze, two miles in all, making a “perfect U-turn” but also running over a street sign post.

All the while, his mother, Nitasha Pridemore , slept.

A baffled man called the sheriff’s office, saying he had seen a little boy driving a car, which was now parked at a mobile home.

A deputy showed up at the home — where Pridemore and Kobie had spent the night with a friend — and asked who had been driving the car.

Pridemore didn’t know. Her heart stopped. She thought someone must have stolen the car that she borrowed from her mother.

Then Pridemore saw the seat pulled all the way up and she realized that her 4-foot-tall son had been behind the wheel.

She found him hiding in the bathroom.

“I’m speechless. I don’t know what to do,” Pridemore said. “I’m taking this as a sign that I’ve got a lot of trouble on my hands.”

She has no idea where he was going or why he chose Thursday morning to start driving. Whenever she asks him, Kobie, who can read lips, just shrugs his shoulders.

In all, he drove on at least four roads in a quiet Brooksville neighborhood. Witnesses told the Sheriff’s Office that a block after he hit the street sign at the corner of Fort Dade and Estates avenues, he walked around the car with his hands on his hips to inspect the damage.

Then he got in, and drove back to the mobile home.

One man followed Kobie to the mobile home, and when Kobie saw that he was being watched, he darted inside.

“He knew he had done something wrong,” Pridemore said. “He pulled in and ran straight to the bathroom.”

Pridemore said her son started to cry.

But a few hours later, the spritely boy was smiling and playing around again.

When a reporter knocked on his door to ask for his mother, Kobie came back a minute later, offering up the car keys.

He has always been into cars and trucks, his mother said.

Kobie has been deaf since birth, his mother said, but he makes up for it in other ways. Beside reading lips, he signs and speaks in drawn-out syllables that his mother understands.

Standing on the stoop with his mom, Kobie pointed to the traffic on the road in front of their house. “Big truck,” he said. He made a sound and pointed at the school buses.

“I do know my mom lets him steer near our house,” Pridemore said. “When he was younger he had Power Wheels.”

Pridemore, 25, is a single mother. She used to work as a waitress but is now unemployed because she doesn’t have her own car.

Pridemore and Kobie live with Pridemore’s mother in Spring Hill. But Wednesday night, Pridemore decided to give her mother and her mother’s husband a little space.

She went over to her friend’s house in Brooksville. With this moving around, she decided that Kobie should just take the day off school.

Pridemore slept in — and her son decided to go for a spin.

The Dodge Intrepid, with 92,528 miles on it, had about $5,000 damage from the collision. The wheels were bent to the side and the front right of the car were bashed up.

The car belonged to Pridemore’s mother, but she had been borrowing it for the last week.

As mother and son stood in front of the mobile home, Kobie pointed to where he drove.

“Yeah, you drove and there you go with that smirk,” Pridemore said to him. “You’re starting to think that it’s a funny matter. It’s just as bad as it was this morning.”

She turned away. Her son picked up a pebble and put it in his mouth.

“It’s scary,” she said. “I could have lost my child.”

Deputies ticketed Kobie for driving without a license. He is due in court Oct. 4.

Staff researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Jonathan Abel can be reached at jabel@sptimes.com or (352) 754-6114.

[Last modified August 31, 2006, 21:25:14]