Michigan Driver Strikes Amish Buggy, Ejecting Four — Including Pregnant Woman; Drug Use Suspected
Michigan has returned to the news with another buggy crash — and again, one involving a (potentially) impaired person behind the wheel.
A driver rear-ended an Amish buggy Friday evening in St. Joseph County, MI, ejecting all four people inside and leaving a pregnant woman in critical condition. Drug use is suspected. Here’s more from WTVB:
According to the St. Joseph County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were dispatched at approximately 8:16 p.m. Friday night, to Maystead Road near Needham Road in Burr Oak Township.
The preliminary investigation shows that an eastbound vehicle struck the rear of a horse-drawn buggy that was also traveling eastbound.
All four occupants of the buggy were ejected in the collision. Two young children involved in the crash are reported to be in stable condition.
Three of the four were hospitalized with serious injuries. The pregnant woman as mentioned is listed as in critical condition, doubly worrying for that family no doubt given that she is carrying a child. The two children being stable is good news, at least.
The driver, a 54-year-old man, was arrested at the scene and ended up in the St. Joseph County Jail. Investigators believe drug use may have been a factor, though the case is still under investigation.
So yet again, a vehicle comes up, often too fast, on a slow-moving buggy, the driver misjudges the closing speed (or isn’t in a state to judge it at all), and the result is what we see here: people ejected from the buggy, and badly hurt.
St. Joseph County, on the border with Indiana, is home to the state’s largest Amish community, at Centreville, with over 2,200 Amish residents. It also has a number of Amish households technically belonging to the northern Indiana settlement.
A few things of note here. This was a late evening crash, around 8:16 p.m. Sunset doesn’t come for another hour in this part of the world. Depending on conditions though, there could be glare or shadow involved at that time.
No word in the report on how the horse ended up.
And once again, it’s Michigan. The state has been the site of a troubling number of serious Amish buggy crashes in recent years, with impaired drivers a recurring factor. By my count, this is the fourth crash in that category since March of last year.
For instance, last December, a pickup truck rear-ended an Amish family’s buggy in Hillsdale County, seriously injuring a man and two of his children. Earlier this year, a Michigan woman was sentenced to six years in prison for a DUI crash that killed an eight-year-old Amish girl.
And that doesn’t include examples like this deadly impaired crash from 2019 which claimed three Amish children’s lives.
Hopefully local efforts to improve buggy safety on Michigan roads will help to some degree, and I applaud that. Though if it’s combating what I see as a main source of the problem – bad driving, including driving under the influence, that probably will take a different approach.
Michigan Buggy Accident
Sickening!!