Amish Infant Thrown From Buggy; Alcohol Likely A Factor In Crash
The 10-month old wasn’t the only one thrown from the buggy. Also ejected were a 2-year-old and a 24-year-old Amish person. You might assume this was a family, and the 24-year-old was the mother.
There aren’t a lot of details but the 30-year-old buggy driver – I’m assuming the father – had to be flown to hospital. Having to be flown somewhere might mean his injuries were worse. The other three were taken to Fort Wayne to a hospital. This happened Sunday night (hat-tip to Peter).
Here’s what’s left over of the buggy in the aftermath. The community is Adams County, Indiana, where most Amish (still) use open-top buggies:
And what was the cause of this Amish family’s misfortune? Sounds like it was yet another person who (probably) shouldn’t possess a driver’s license. From wane.com:
Shanelle Bayes, 32, was driving the car and wasn’t injured in the crash, according to the release. Investigators said they believe alcohol was a factor in the collision.
Bayes said that she didn’t see the buggy. And then rear-ended it. I put (probably) in parentheses because as noted above, we don’t have too many details.
Maybe Bayes had had a single drink. You can drive in Indiana with a BAC up to 0.08. Still, investigators believe it was a factor. That probably means there were signs of impairment or otherwise to suggest that alcohol affected the driving here. Bayes’ car sustained a lot of damage. No word on the horse.
Here’s hoping that being thrown from the buggy may have resulted in less severe injuries for those little ones in particular, which is possible.
Horrific :(
It must be horrific for the Amish community to have to read stories like this happening all the time. Is it about time Amish-populated states have buggy lanes on countryside roads?
Another bad car driver.
Need to start punishing drivers more severely. Permanent lose of license. Jail time. Heavier fines. Otherwise, it will continue to get worse. More and more people refuse to learn that the roads are to be shared. It’s literally the law. They are not just for cars. Too many drivers think they have a ‘ownership’ of the road. The culture of tolerating speeding, drinking and driving, and cell phone use needs to end.
Well said and the right way to think about roads.
Not believable.
I kept looking at the pic of the car. I am just not believing she only hit that buggy. Was she near a brick wall first? Looking at that pic makes me think she hit something before she hit the buggy. Maybe that is why she did not see the buggy..
I am praying for the Amish family, hoping they are all not in serious condition.. That pic is weighing on my mind.
I totally agree with you.
Crumpled hood?
The degree of crumpling of the hood bothers me.
Car damage
I had a similar impression when I first saw it. But if you add the weights of a 1,000-lb horse, 400-500-lb buggy (ballpark guess), plus the weights of 2 adults, you’re talking about a unit with a total weight approaching 2,000 lbs.
And the buggy is probably not traveling faster than 6-8 mph, and could be going slower than that. So it’s closer to hitting a stationary object, than it is to, say, hitting another car also going 35-45+ mph.
Also, nowadays cars are designed to “crumple” more than they once were in order to absorb impact. So I think all that adds up to what we are seeing here.
Prayers
Prayers for all involved
reply
praying for the family involved for comfort and also healing of injuries
it appears to me the car or truck was doing 30 to 40 miles per hour at impact with the buggy
and for them to say they didnt see the buggy is just a lame excuse
Collision
Hopefully all the Amish who were injured by the woman evidently speeding, by the evidence showing the damage to both the buggy and car, will be alright. Whether alcohol was a factor or not in this instance is irrelevant; too many English believe “the road” belongs to them alone and they flout the laws regarding road markings and signs of warning. Shame on them and their intolerant attitude!
Assumptions about blame should be cautious
Goodness – I’m amazed anyone survived that! I hope they all make a full recovery.
I think it is, as always, necessary to be careful about assumptions, particularly when they are attached to a specific person’s name and involve blame for something.
That someone didn’t see a buggy may or may not be an extenuation depending on driving conditions and other factors. The night pictures of the wreckage suggest it might not have been full daylight. Suppose it was twilight and the buggy lights were accidentally out, or some such? Or that the buggy had raced, practically invisible for whatever reason, out of a turning close in front of her, as in the footage of the spooked horse on the drifting buggy somewhere on this website, and she hadn’t realised that the road in front of her was suddenly occupied and that she needed to do an emergency stop? I’m not saying that it is so, merely pointing out that there is insufficient information to make a just judgement as to where responsibility lies, or indeed, as to whether anyone was to blame at all, as opposed to it simply being a matter of people not being infallible and occasionally making mistakes.
Does this group use conventional markings or some usually effective alternative, by the way, or are there known problems with visibility? I strongly believe that their own safety in the following of such principles is entirely their business – if they want to take that risk, it isn’t for others to interfere – but other road users do have reason to mind about what happens to them in the context of accidents, particularly if there is a tendency to automatically blame the driver.
Nothing here says anything about what the speed limit was, which presumably means that it is impossible to know whether or not she was breaking it from the fact that the damage on the car suggests she was going at some speed? And as far as the alcohol thing goes, the woman may have had the single legal drink or someone else may have given her the alcohol without her knowledge or consent (major problem among students when I was a student). “Investigators believe alcohol involved,” is a very far from, “Proven deliberate drunk driving.”
I agree, though, in the abstract, that road sharing is an important concept.
She had to be speeding
LOOK AT HER CAR DAMAGE. Cops know what her speed was.
She knows the Amish live in the area.
The car damage doesn't tell me what the speed limit was...
The car damage doesn’t prove anything on its own. To be speeding, it is necessary to go faster than the stated speed limit on the specific road used! Knowing the speed a vehicle was travelling at therefore does not constitute sufficient information to say someone was speeding. It’s necessary to know the speed limit as well. I mean, if she was travelling at 50mph and the speed limit is 60, then she wasn’t speeding as such, though that doesn’t preclude reckless driving. (The speed limit on a similar road in my country, in as far as I can tell from the little shown in the pictures, probably would be sixty).
The investigators aren’t reported here as saying that she was speeding. I agree that the cops should be able to work out at least approximately how fast the car was going from the damage (car safety test data ought to come in handy). But that would seem another reason to suppose that if they haven’t said, the matter is at least still in reasonable doubt.
There have been crashes – or near misses – where the people who have been “disobeying” the rules of the road in an accident have been either the Amish or the buggy horse. The driver of the car cannot be be assumed to be to blame until it has been established what happened. If a driver had hit the buggy in this case: https://amishamerica.com/amish-buggy-drifting-video/, said driver would not have been to blame if they had been obeying all the rules of the road themselves.
Of course, if other people are speaking from other sources of information – such as being local and knowing the speed limit on the road, or from news reported elsewhere – what they are saying might make perfect sense and not be assumptions, but it would make sense to mention the source, or at least that there is a source!
Praying for the family
Erik, please try to keep us updated on this horror.