For the second time in less than a month, a claw machine gobbled up a child and wouldn’t set them free. Note to parents: this particular evil contraption is located at the Soccer Dome at Vetta Sports in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.
The claw machine capture occurred while his dad was watching his daughter’s soccer game. When he looked over at his 3-year-old son, Patrick, sure enough, he was inside the claw machine.
“I knew Patrick was going to get stuck in there,” Patrick’s sister told First Alert 4.
When the boy was asked why he crawled into the arcade game, he replied, “I get ball.” Hard to argue with that logic.
“Patrick’s reaction… like someone took a picture of him and he’s like immediately just said ‘cheese’ and posed for the camera, like unfazed that he was stuck in a machine,” his mother told WLWT News.
The claw machine in Webster Groves is becoming notorious
This wasn’t the first time firefighters had responded to the Webster Groves Soccer Dome for a claw machine rescue. It wasn’t even the first time in the past month. Just a few weeks prior to Patrick getting stuck, a two-year-old boy named Cooper crawled inside the same game and got trapped.
“He’s laughing, throwing balls everywhere. We were like, ‘Cooper, try and go back down.’ And he was shaking his head,” Cooper’s mother said.
“If anyone knew my son Cooper, they would totally understand that he would do something like this,” she told First Alert 4. “I literally glanced over there. He was pretending to play with the claw machine. I looked away for, I would say, maybe 15 seconds.”
Webster Groves firefighters have now assembled a special toolkit to get kids out of the machine. This should really become standard at any facility with a claw machine arcade game.