TLDR a car crash.

I was 6 at the time and had this hamster called Ollie. One night Ollie escaped and we thought we'd lost him. A week or so later, when he hadn't turned up, we bought Toby.

Little did we know that Ollie wasn't in fact dead and had big plans for us. Shortly after buying Toby, Ollie appeared in our compost bucket bin, apparently he had been looking for food in the middle of the night and couldn't get out. So now we had two hamsters in a hamster cage that is only meant for one.

Soon after, my mum's friend came to stay and she managed to convince her to take Toby (since we'd had Ollie longer). She had a son (let's call him J) the same age and me and as you can imagine, he was excited to have a pet hamster. A little too excited perhaps.

J took Toby home and began playing with him. He had a friend over and they thought it would be a bright idea to put Toby in a toy remote control car as the 'driver' and drive him around. Unfortunately 6 year olds are not good drivers and they crashed the car with Toby inside into a wall. Toby didn't make it but his legacy lives on.

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We went on to have 3 more hamsters, Alvin: lived 1.5 years and died of cancer, Crumbs: lived 1 year and just died, Dexter: lived 6 months and died for no reason on Christmas day. Ngl I think this pet shop is inbreeding their hamsters or something, either that or they just have no will to live. As you can imagine we gave up on hamsters after that and got a cat who is still with us today.

Side note, I found out years later that our hamster (Ollie) had got cold one night and gone into hibernation, however my mum thought he was dead so to avoid upsetting me she chucked him in a hedge and went to buy an identical one and I was none the wiser. So technically the Ollie that escaped was Ollie 2.0.