Driver Distracted By Notebook Hits Amish Buggy — 11-Year-Old Suffers Skull Fracture
Four people were injured Monday evening when a car struck the back of a horse-drawn buggy on State Road 13 in Elkhart County, Indiana. This was another case of distracted driving, according to reports.
Three of the four people injured were children. An 11-year-old girl was taken to the hospital with a “non-life-threatening” skull fracture.
The crash happened around 5:50 p.m. on Monday, August 17, in Indiana’s largest Amish settlement. The source of the distraction was not a phone – but a notebook.
“Notebook” is a word which, nowadays, it’s not totally clear what it means. I’m going to assume that it is the pen-and-paper type of notebook, and not the alternate word for laptop. More from WNDU:
According to investigators, a 56-year-old Syracuse man was driving south on State Road 13 in a Ford Taurus when he became distracted while looking at his notebook and was unable to stop his car.
He reportedly hit the back of a southbound horse-drawn buggy, causing what police described as “catastrophic back-end damage” to the buggy.
Police said an 11-year-old girl who was riding in the buggy was taken to the hospital after suffering a non-life-threatening small fracture to her skull.
An 11-year-old boy in the buggy suffered a head laceration. A 2-year-old boy in the buggy suffered a knee laceration. The driver of the buggy, a 41-year-old man, suffered a minor laceration to the head.
So the outcome is three head injuries and a knee injury to the toddler. They, along with the driver of the car, are fortunate it wasn’t worse. When I saw skull fracture, you tend to think that is pretty bad, but by this description, it sounds like she is going to survive.
The horse was also injured, with minor lacerations, but they are also non-life-threatening.
Just a note on the home town of the Ford driver – Syracuse is the name of a town not far away from here in Kosciusko County, so it’s not the better-known city in New York. That also fits with the common pattern that it’s locals who are involved in these crashes much more often than tourist visitors to the Amish.
ABC57 reports that no citations were issued in the incident. The driver of the Taurus did undergo a blood draw, with results still pending as of Tuesday. Police said the crash remains under investigation.
What The Data Says About Who Causes Buggy Crashes
A study published earlier this year in the Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities examined 426 buggy crashes reported over an eight-year period in The Diary, an Amish correspondence paper.
Among the crashes where a cause was recorded, 76% were attributed to motor vehicle driver error, a category covering speeding, impairment, and phone use. Buggy driver error, horse error, and mechanical problems together accounted for 16%.
Study co-author Mark Dewalt captured the dynamic apparently operating in this crash, in this quote:
“Most buggies are hit in broad daylight on a straight road,” Dewalt said.
“That’s usually the case. I think it’s because people in our culture aren’t concentrating on what they’re doing. I just got a new car, and there’s so many things that can distract my attention while I’m driving.”
The one thing to add in this case is that the blood test results aren’t in (though there is no direct suggestion in the reporting that impairment was at play here). But as to Dewalt’s point, we’ve seen numerous examples of just that – driver distraction leading to a destroyed buggy and hurt Amish people – sometimes fatally:
- In May, a pickup driver in Wisconsin told deputies he had seen the buggy ahead of him but looked away to do something in his truck, killing the Amish man riding in it and his horse.
- Also in May, an SUV driver in Ohio was reaching for her sunglasses at about 55 miles per hour when she rear-ended a buggy, killing one Amish man and sending a 10-year-old boy to the hospital by helicopter.
- In September 2025, state police in Virginia said a driver was distracted with no signs of impairment when she hit a buggy carrying seven people, two of whom were medflighted.
- In July 2025, a pickup driver in Indiana told investigators he had been on his cellphone after striking and killing an Amish man riding a bicycle.
The moral of the story – we need to pay better attention on the road.
Skull Fracture
How can a skull fracture possibly be non- life-threatening??