Millvale, Pa. Parents Charged For Driving On Pennsylvania Turnpike With 10-Year-Old Girl In Cage In Bed Of Pickup Truck

Memorial Day weekend travelers on America's first tollway were shocked at what they saw while heading home Monday evening.

A girl and a dog reportedly were in a cage in the back of the girl's parents pickup truck as they rode along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, according to witnesses' calls to police. Indeed a 10-year-old girl and her dog were found together in the bed of a pickup truck driven by Thomas Fishinger, 30, of Millvale, Pa. in that very same town. Fishinger and the girl's mother Abbey Carlson, 29, also of Millvale, near Pittsburgh, were charged with endangering the welfare of a child.

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According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a motorist in the eastbound lanes of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Beaver County, bordering Ohio, called police around 7 p.m. to report a girl and a dog in a cage together on the back of another motorist's truck. Soon, at least one other call was made to police. Through descriptions and license plate identification, police were led to Millvale, where all four occupants were reportedly found to be safe.

Fishinger explained to authorities that on their way home, his 10-year-old daughter asked to be with the dog, and he allegedly obliged.

On October 1, 1940, the first motorist entered the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which at the time only spanned a moderate portion of the middle of the Keystone State, from Carlisle, near Harrisburg, to Irwin.

By the late 1950s, the entire Mainline Turnpike from the Ohio Border to Florence, N.J. was completed. Around that same time, the Turnpike's largest spur, the Northeast Extension opened from Clarks Summit in the upper Poconos to Plymouth Meeting, Pa. was built. It eventually became continuous from I-81 to I-95 via the "Blue Route" connector, which opened in the 1990s.