Found by Police : Baby Goes to Town Through Doggie Door

Twenty-month-old Sean Carter hopped out of his crib Friday morning, crawled through the doggie door and kept on going for nearly half a mile, scaring his parents out of their wits but charming the badges off the guys at the Lakewood Sheriff’s Station.

Within a couple of hours, the deputies had put Sean in a patrol car and were broadcasting his gurgling and very small small-talk over the car’s public address system, in search of his parents who were sleeping soundly a few blocks away.

Sean disappeared from his Lakewood home before dawn, toddling out into the cold morning dressed only in his blanket-sleeper pajamas. He had climbed over the top of his crib--a favorite pastime of his--and scooted out through the doggie door.

His parents, Charles Carter, 33, and Susan, 22, awoke at 7:30, found Sean missing and ran up and down the street in panic.

“We were in tears,” Susan Carter said. “We even had our 5-year-old, Steven, bicycling on the sidewalk, looking for him.”

But they needn’t have worried. Mary Van Vorren, 58, was taking her usual early morning walk on Allington Street when she spotted Sean about 5 a.m., walking, crawling and generally toddling his way happily along.

She called deputies, who arrived to find the blue-eyed child “robust and healthy,” Sheriff’s Lt. Don Brooks said.

The youngster had wandered so far from home that eight patrol cars of deputies with bullhorns conducting a street-by-street search of the area failed to locate his parents.

Sean was taken to the patrol station, where he gave deputies an early morning workout as he cavorted up and down the halls. “He’s been real active,” Brooks said.

“He had milk and cereal and then cookies and, when the secretary came in, she changed his diaper.”

In the meantime, the Carters had called deputies and Charles Carter was on his way to a reunion with his wandering son.

“I’m glad he had his heavy pajamas on,” Susan Carter said. “It was cold this morning. When we got him, he had no fever or anything; his nose wasn’t even running.”

She said her husband has promised to nail the doggie door shut. The thing of it is, she said, the family doesn’t even have a dog anymore--just a cat whose access to the great outdoors, like Sean’s, from now on will be severely limited.