Woman Charged in DUI Crash That Injured Five Amish, One Critically

This one was first reported in August, out of Van Buren County, Michigan – an (allegedly) intoxicated driver hit an Amish buggy in the evening hours, leading to five Amish people being injured.

One of them had to receive “life-saving measures” (it was originally reported that six were injured, but that has been revised to five).

To her credit, she stayed on the scene of the accident, and was described as “cooperative”…unlike some others who cause buggy crashes, such as this driver who injured two Amish and fled, a little over a week earlier.

Now it’s been learned that she faces five counts of OWI (operating while intoxicated) causing serious injury. More from WWMT:

A woman is charged with operating while intoxicated causing serious injury after an August crash involving an Amish buggy that injured five people.

Six people in an Amish buggy traveling west on CR 388 were taken to the hospital, four with serious injuries, one with critical, on Aug. 8, 2025 after they were rear-ended by an SUV.

The driver of the SUV, 33-year-old Chelsea Kristine Owens, who stayed at the scene and cooperated with the responding Van Buren County Sheriff’s Office (VBCSO) deputies, is facing five counts of operating while intoxicated causing serious injury as of Tuesday, following her initial August arrest.

The article notes that more information had been sought as to the status of the injured. At the time of the wreck, four were said to have serious injuries, and one critical injuries.

People aren’t going to change their behavior…will tech solve this?

Looks like another likely preventable accident, if people would just stop driving while drunk. But that’s apparently a lot to ask.

I don’t expect people’s behavior to change, because we have decades upon decades of drunk driving in the history books. We have seen a recent long-term increase of drunk driving fatalities of about 25% from 2014 to 2023 (though it’s tacked down some since then). The threat of punishment as things stand does not deter this behavior (or not as much as one would hope).

That is why I hope technology delivers on this one. Tech is used to address so many everyday problems, many of them mundane and hardly life-and-death matters. So I’m a bit surprised that there haven’t been better technological solutions developed and implemented to prevent drunk driving.

We already accept all sorts of warning systems and functions on our modern vehicles, a number of which negatively impact the enjoyment of operating a vehicle, and some of which remove a degree of autonomy from the driver (lane assist, for instance).

And many of them are there in the name of “safety”. While I’m not keen on self-driving vehicles for various reasons, I think heavily reducing drunk driving would be one great benefit of such technology becoming widespread.

But leaving self-driving cars aside, things like passive alcohol sensors and impairment-tracking technology would seem a feasible and reasonable application of tech to prevent drunk driving. Assuming they can get it right, and it is neither easily evadable, nor too intrusive to cause major objection.

There would be hurdles of course, such as public acceptance (public backlash caused the seat belt interlock system requirement to fail in the 1970s), but it seems these are different times, and we are more accepting of marginally freedom-restricting technologies in our vehicles.

On that matter it’s also hard to argue for the “freedom” to drive a vehicle while impaired, when it is an illegal and dangerous behavior that can and often does lead to people getting killed.

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