The 3-year-old boy had crawled up the claw machine’s prize dispenser to grab a toy
A 3-year-old boy in Australia just had a close encounter with a Hello Kitty claw machine!
On Thursday, Queensland Police revealed they had to rescue the boy after he crawled up the machine’s prize dispenser to grab a toy.
“Ethan and the Police: 1 Claw Machine: 0,” the police’s caption on X (formerly known as Twitter) read. “Police were called in to rescue the adventurous Ethan, who had crawled up into a toy machine at a Capalaba shopping centre on Saturday.”
In the video, Ethan could be seen sitting with the Hello Kitty toys inside the machine as his parents and some police officers discussed how to safely get him out.:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/toddler-stuck-claw-machine-020124-3-ec922d8539d84a37a9000fa2c56614a5.jpg)
Tapping on the machine as Ethan appeared unconcerned, the officers discovered that it was made out of glass.
“Are you able to get him into that back corner?” an officer asked Ethan’s father Timothy Hopper, who then directed his son to go to his mother who was standing on the other side of the machine.
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“Ethan cover your eyes, hide,” the father said before a police officer broke one side of the machine’s glass window.
Immediately turning around to see the glass shattered, Ethan crawled over to his father who then picked him up and carried him safely away.
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“You won a prize, which one do you want?” Hopper joked as his son smiled while standing on his two feet.
“He loves claw machines … As he always does, he opened up the flap to be an opportunist,” Hopper told The Guardian. “Then, within a split second, he crawled into the machine, the door closed behind him. He stood up and realized what happened and he was king of the mountain.”
According to the outlet, Ethan had been in the machine for 10 to 15 minutes.
“When we got the call there was a bit of a smile in the car. Both [of us] as fathers, thinking what our boys would do,” Senior Constable Stuart Power told The Guardian.
“Kids are kids,” he added. “My boy’s 4 and I’m surprised he hasn’t done similar.”