5-Year-Old Grifters Escape Kindergarten Shawshank-Style

Children look cute and innocent, but they can be as cunning and resourceful as any grifter, and this week a pair of five-year-olds proved it by tunneling, Shawshank-style, out of their kindergarten and going on the run.

According to The Guardian, the two five-year-old boys were enrolled at a kindergarten in the city of Magnitogorsk in Russia. Armed with only a pair of sandbox shovels and a whole lot of chutzpah, the two boys spent several days digging a hole under the fence around the kindergarten. They’d dig whenever their group had outside time, then they’d hide the hole and come back to it the next day. Somehow nobody noticed the giant hole, even after the two boys wriggled through it and ran away.

After tunneling under the kindergarten’s fence, the boys walked to a luxury car dealership over a mile away from their kindergarten. As they looked around, a driver noticed them and asked a question any of us would ask in the situation: “Where on Earth did this pair of sand-covered 5-year-olds come from?”

The kids told her that they had escaped from kindergarten and came to the car dealership to buy a Jaguar. These tiny geniuses thought the first part of their plan through perfectly, but they were ultimately unsuccessful because they forgot that it takes money to buy a Jaguar, and also that they are five years old and no adult would let them buy and drive a sports car. (The only way their plan could be any cuter is if they pretended to be a grown man by standing on each other’s shoulders under a big trench coat.)

The driver piled the two kids into her car and drove them to the police station, where police quickly figured out where the boys had come from and where they were supposed to be. Somehow, the kindergarten had not noticed they were missing for about half an hour.

After the boys were returned, the educational department fired the supervisor responsible for the kindergarten at the time of their escape and issued an official reprimand to the head of the school. The boys’ parents have reportedly decided not to file a complaint or pursue any action against the school.

(Photo: iStockPhoto/GettyImages skodonnell)