If a drunk driver hit you or someone you love in Fort Wayne, you have the right to pursue a civil claim against that driver, separate from whatever the State of Indiana does with the criminal case. At Blackburn Romey, we help Fort Wayne families hold negligent drivers accountable for the harm they caused. You are already dealing with medical care, missed work, and an insurance company that starts building its defense the moment it hears from you. Call 833-366-6595 for a free, confidential consultation about what happened to you.
This page focuses on crashes where alcohol was involved. For a car accident of any kind in Fort Wayne, see our Fort Wayne car accident page, and for claims anywhere in Indiana, our statewide car accident lawyer practice.
Personal injury and wrongful death law is all we do. We have decades of experience focusing exclusively on those claims, not a general practice that picks up a car accident case between other kinds of work.
Attorney Chris Blackburn has tried cases in Allen County, so he knows the courtroom your claim may end up in. He passed the Indiana bar exam in February 2011 and has practiced law in Indiana since that May.
What a claim is worth depends on the medical records and the facts of the crash, so no web page can put a number on yours. A free consultation is where we look at what happened and give you a straight answer about whether there is a claim worth bringing. This page walks through how a Fort Wayne drunk driving claim actually works.
In the first days, very little of it is in your control.
The police may or may not arrest the driver at the scene. The insurance company may call you before you have even left the hospital, often to get a recorded statement that it can use against you later.
If the driver fled before police arrived, you are dealing with a hit-and-run on top of a drunk driving crash, and knowing what to do next matters right away.
A civil claim puts you back in control. Once we open it, the insurance company deals with our office, and the evidence gets preserved before it disappears.
Medical bills and missed paychecks do not wait for a criminal case to resolve, and the insurance company knows that. Opening a civil claim early is how you make sure that pressure works for you instead of against you.
More often than most people expect, the county keeps count.
According to Indiana Crash Facts 2024, published by the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute with the Indiana University Public Policy Institute, Allen County recorded 343 alcohol-impaired collisions in 2024. The report counts a collision as alcohol-impaired where “at least one vehicle driver involved has a BAC test result at or above 0.08 g/dL.”
Most of those crashes caused injury or property damage rather than death, but 6 were fatal. Those 6 fatal collisions made up 15.8% of Allen County’s 38 fatal crashes that year. Roughly one in six deadly crashes in the county involved a driver who had been drinking, a higher share than Indiana’s statewide rate of 10.0%.
Allen County logged 12,878 collisions of every kind in 2024, the third-highest total of any of Indiana’s 92 counties. That volume is part of why we see cases like yours so often, and it is part of why we take drunk driving claims in this county seriously.
A civil claim from a drunk driving crash in Allen County is typically filed in the Allen Superior Court’s Civil Division, at the Allen County Courthouse in Fort Wayne.
For the clients we represent, where and how the claim gets filed is handled by our office, so you can focus on recovering instead of navigating the court system.
You have two years to file. For most crash injuries, the clock starts on the date of the crash. That deadline comes from IC 34-11-2-4 for an injury claim, and from IC 34-23-1-1 for a wrongful death claim. Miss that deadline, and you generally lose the right to bring the case at all.
Indiana also follows a comparative fault rule in a claim against another driver. Under IC 34-51-2-6, you can still recover as long as your own fault is not greater than everyone else’s combined, and any lesser share of fault under IC 34-51-2-5 simply reduces your award rather than wiping it out.
The driver’s criminal case does not replace your civil claim. Restitution ordered against the driver does not bar your separate civil action under IC 35-50-5-3, and it carries no compensation for pain and suffering. A felony-level OWI conviction can be used as evidence in your civil case under IC 34-39-3-1.
These rules shape what your claim can recover and how it interacts with the criminal case, and they are why the timing of your filing matters from the very first day.
Once we open your claim, proving what happened becomes our work.
None of this changes what happened to you, but it changes who carries the weight of proving it. That is worth more than waiting to see what the criminal case does on its own. Call 833-366-6595 to talk through what changes once Blackburn Romey is on your side.
The questions below come up most often from Fort Wayne clients dealing with a drunk driving crash, not the general car accident questions we cover elsewhere on this site. If your question is not here, call 833-366-6595. The consultation is free.
Allen County recorded 343 alcohol-impaired collisions in 2024, and 6 of them were fatal. That is about one in six of the county’s fatal crashes that year, according to Indiana Crash Facts 2024.
In the Allen Superior Court’s Civil Division, at the Allen County Courthouse in Fort Wayne. That is the division that hears negligence claims like a drunk driving crash, and for the clients we represent our office handles the filing.
Sometimes, yes. Under Indiana’s dram shop law, IC 7.1-5-10-15.5, whoever furnished the alcohol can be liable if they knew the person was visibly intoxicated at the time and that intoxication was a proximate cause of the crash. The statute’s definition of “furnish” reaches a private social host, not just a bar or restaurant, which can open an additional avenue for recovery.
Yes. Not wearing a seat belt does not, by itself, count as fault. A 2024 change to Indiana law, IC 9-19-10-7, now allows it to be raised for mitigation of damages in crashes after June 30, 2024, for a plaintiff aged 15 or older. It is a factor to weigh, not a bar to recovery.
No. Punitive damages require clear and convincing evidence, not just a drunk driving charge. Under IC 34-51-3-2, a court must be convinced before awarding them, and IC 34-51-3-4 caps the amount, with part of any award going to a state fund under IC 34-51-3-6 rather than to you alone.
You may be dealing with a hit-and-run on top of a drunk driving crash, and that changes what happens next. Evidence like traffic camera footage and witness accounts matters more while the driver is still unidentified. Preserving it early is one of the first things we look at in a hit-and-run claim we take on.
If a drunk driver hit you or someone you love in Fort Wayne or anywhere in Allen County, Blackburn Romey is ready to help. Call 833-366-6595 or contact us for a free, confidential consultation.
Learn more on our Fort Wayne personal injury page. We also serve clients in Merrillville, South Bend, Lafayette, Terre Haute, and Evansville.
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