Most people assume a hit and run claim dies the moment the driver disappears. It does not. Indiana law put the duty to stop, identify themselves and get help on the driver who hit you. When that driver is never found, the claim usually turns to your own insurance instead of theirs. What changes is the route. Indiana sets one route for your injuries, and a different, harder one for your car.
Personal injury and wrongful death law is all we do, and hit and run claims are part of that work across Lake County. When the driver who hit you is gone, the claim usually runs on your own policy and on the record of the crash, rather than on that driver’s insurance. Two questions then decide most of it. What did the law require that driver to do before they drove off? And which coverage responds when nobody ever finds them?
Tom Blackburn, a founding partner, has practiced personal injury law since 1985. Frank Wolferd is a member of the Lake County Bar Association, the county a Merrillville claim belongs to.
Often enough that Lake County’s hit-and-run rate sits among the three highest county rates in the state. Indiana Crash Facts 2024 puts the county’s hit-and-run share at roughly one in five collisions in 2024. That is among the highest county rates in Indiana, against an average county figure of 8%. The same report records 15,694 collisions of every kind in Lake County in 2024. That was the second-highest total of Indiana’s 92 counties. At town level, Indiana County Profiles 2023 records 1,335 collisions of every kind in Merrillville in 2023. None of those numbers is the one that decides your own claim, though. For the injury half of a hit and run claim, the number that usually matters most is the uninsured motorist coverage on your own policy, because that is where the injury claim generally turns when the driver is never found — and that limit is a ceiling on what the coverage can pay, not a figure you are owed. The claim for your car runs on a different rule, and we come to it below.
Indiana law, IC 9-26-1-1.1, required the driver who hit you to stop. That meant stopping at the scene, or as close to it as possible, in a manner that does not obstruct traffic more than is necessary. They then had to remain there. They had to give their name, address and plate number, and show their license.
Because someone was hurt, they had two further duties. The first was to provide reasonable assistance to each person injured in or entrapped by the accident, as directed by a law enforcement officer, medical personnel or a 911 operator. The second was to give notice of the accident as soon as possible, or ensure another person gives notice. That notice goes to the local police if the crash happened inside a municipality, to the sheriff or nearest state police post if it happened outside one, or to a 911 operator.
Each of those is a separate thing the driver failed to do. Each one is also a fact the police report, the scene and any witness can speak to later. Our guide to what to do after a hit and run covers the steps that preserve that record while it is still fresh.
Only in one narrow situation, and not on a crash like yours. The stopping duty has one qualification built into it, at IC 9-26-1-1.2. There is one narrow exception to the duty to stop where the vehicle stops in the traveled portion of a highway: the driver then has to move it off the traveled portion, as soon as safely possible, to a place as close to the accident as possible. It does not apply — and the driver must not move the vehicle — where the accident involved the transportation of hazardous materials, or where it resulted in injury or death or trapped someone in a vehicle.
Not moving the vehicle when that duty does apply is a Class C infraction, which is not a crime and carries a money judgment of up to $500 rather than any jail time. And moving the vehicle changes nothing else: the duties to give information, to provide assistance, and to notify the owner of a damaged vehicle or property all still apply, and failing to meet them knowingly or intentionally is still leaving the scene of an accident, carrying the same penalties. So on a crash that injured someone, nothing in that exception allowed the driver to leave, and even where it does apply it releases a driver from nothing else.
It can, once the grade of the offense is high enough. A driver who knowingly or intentionally fails to do those things commits leaving the scene of an accident under the same statute. That is a crime in its own right. The base grade is a Class B misdemeanor. It rises to a Class A misdemeanor when someone suffered bodily injury. The grade is a Level 6 felony when the injury was moderate or serious, or when the driver had a qualifying prior conviction within five years. Death or catastrophic injury makes it a Level 4 felony. A driver who fled during or after drunk driving that caused serious bodily injury, death or catastrophic injury commits a Level 3 felony.
Under IC 35-50-2-7, a Level 6 felony in Indiana carries a fixed term of between six months and two and a half years, with an advisory sentence of one year, and a fine of up to $10,000 on top. That sentencing range is why a felony conviction is generally the level at which the driver’s guilty judgment can be used as evidence in your civil case. A court also has a discretionary power to enter judgment on a Level 6 felony as a Class A misdemeanor instead and sentence accordingly, but it is barred from doing so in the situations the statute lists — including where the person already had an unrelated felony entered as a Class A misdemeanor less than three years before — and where it does use the power it has to record its reasons in detail. Under IC 34-39-3-1, the conviction is admissible in your civil case to prove the facts the conviction rested on. The rule reaches only crimes punishable by more than a year, so a misdemeanor conviction does not qualify.
The same statute reaches that too, and it adds duties rather than replacing them. Say the driver hit your unattended car, or damaged property other than a vehicle. They also had to take reasonable steps to find the owner and tell them. If after reasonable inquiry they still could not find the owner, they were then required to contact law enforcement and give the same information.
Those duties come on top of the stop-and-identify duties. They are not a substitute for them. The trigger is an unattended vehicle, or damage to property other than a vehicle. So the rule is not confined to parking lots, and nobody needs to have been hurt for it to apply. For you, that means this: a driver who left no traceable contact details and made no report to law enforcement failed a duty the statute placed on them, whatever the damage came to. We go through the scenario in more detail on our page about someone hitting a parked car and leaving in Indiana.
Usually your own insurer, through the uninsured motorist coverage on your own policy. Under IC 27-7-5-2, an insurer must make available uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage on an ordinary Indiana auto liability policy. Umbrella and excess policies are treated differently. A second duty sits alongside that one. The coverage must be provided in limits at least equal to the bodily-injury liability limits of the insured’s own policy, unless the insured rejected the coverage in writing.
Does an unidentified driver count as “uninsured” under your own policy? That turns on the policy’s wording. IC 27-7-5-4 defines an uninsured motor vehicle subject to the terms and conditions of that coverage. So the document to read first is your own policy, not the police report. No adjuster should tell you the injury claim is over simply because the driver was never found. The wider claim after any crash here is covered on our Merrillville car accident attorney page.
For damage to your car the statute is harder than it is for your injuries. Under IC 27-7-5-3, a property-damage claim under uninsured motorist coverage must give the name and address of the at-fault operator. And no liability is imposed on the insurer where the owner or operator of the other vehicle cannot be identified. That is a rule about uninsured motorist property damage claims. It says nothing about the rest of your own policy. It is also why the two halves of your claim can end up on different footings. The injury side turns on your policy’s definition of an uninsured motor vehicle. The property side turns on whether the driver can be named.
Under IC 34-11-2-4, Indiana gives you two years from when your claim arises to file an injury lawsuit. For most crash injuries that means two years from the day of the crash. Against a private driver or their insurer, that two years governs the injury lawsuit. Your own uninsured motorist coverage applies subject to the terms and conditions of that coverage under IC 27-7-5-4, so have your own policy read rather than assume one date covers everything.
The two years is not the first deadline where a government defendant is involved. Where an injury claim is a tort claim against a governmental defendant under Indiana’s Tort Claims Act, notice comes first: a claim against a political subdivision (a county, township, city, town, school corporation, state educational institution, city or county hospital, or another entity in the definition at IC 34-6-2.1-155) is barred unless notice is filed with its governing body (and, in the cases the statute specifies, with the Indiana political subdivision risk management commission) within 180 days after the loss occurs, and a claim against the state is barred unless notice is filed with the attorney general or the state agency involved within 270 days after the loss occurs. The notice must be in writing and delivered in person or by registered or certified mail.
Both windows are far shorter than the two-year lawsuit deadline, and the Act has narrow exceptions of its own — so if any government body may be involved, speak to a lawyer well before the notice window closes, and do not assume a missed window has ended the claim without asking. Those windows are set by IC 34-13-3-8(a) for a political subdivision and IC 34-13-3-6(a) for the state, with the form of the notice at IC 34-13-3-12. That is a live question in a hit and run, because the vehicle that left can be a government one — a municipal truck, a squad car, a school bus — or the road authority can be in the frame. The same notice rule reaches a wrongful death claim brought against a governmental defendant.
Where the person who died was not a child as Indiana defines one, the wrongful death lawsuit is brought by the personal representative of the person who died. IC 34-23-1-1 requires that action to be filed within two years.
Which of those two routes you are on turns on how Indiana defines a child here, and the definition is narrower than most families expect. Three conditions all had to be met. The person who died had to have been unmarried, and without dependents, and either under twenty, or under twenty-three and enrolled in a postsecondary institution or in a career or technical program that is not a postsecondary program. If any one of those was not true, the claim is the personal representative’s to bring under IC 34-23-1-1.
Where the person who died was a child in that sense, IC 34-23-2-1 sets out who may bring the claim instead. The action may be maintained by the father and mother jointly, or by either of them if they name the other parent as a codefendant to answer as to his or her interest. It may also be maintained, after a divorce or dissolution of marriage, by the person to whom custody of the child was awarded. Or it may be maintained by a guardian, for a protected person.
If the person who was awarded custody has since died, a personal representative is appointed to maintain the action. A child’s claim is not one to leave sitting. Indiana’s two-year injury deadline is the one to work to, so ask a lawyer about your own dates rather than assuming you have longer.
Yes, where the crash caused serious injury or death. Under IC 9-26-1-0.5, an accident does not require proof of a collision between the driver’s vehicle and another vehicle or another person, where it involves serious bodily injury or death. So a driver can be responsible for leaving the scene even if their vehicle never touched you or your car.
Yes. Leaving the scene is graded from a Class B misdemeanor up to a Level 3 felony. Subsection (c) of IC 9-26-1-1.1 reaches the four enhanced grades, (b)(1) through (b)(4). That includes the Level 6 felony reached through a qualifying prior conviction rather than through injury. Wherever one of them applies, the driver commits a separate offense for each person whose injury or death resulted from the accident.
Ordinarily yes, as the base Class B misdemeanor. The injury and death grades in IC 9-26-1-1.1(b)(1), (b)(2)(A), (b)(3) and (b)(4) do not apply where nobody was hurt. It is not always a misdemeanor, though. Subsection (b)(2)(B) of the same statute still makes it a Level 6 felony where the operator had a qualifying conviction within the preceding five years.
No. Under IC 27-7-5-2, an insurer may not sell or provide underinsured motorist coverage below $50,000 on an ordinary Indiana auto liability policy. That figure is a floor on what an insurer may sell, not a benefit every driver has. Someone who rejected uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage in writing carries none of it at all.
Where your car was legally parked and unoccupied when it was hit by a driver you are legally entitled to recover from as an uninsured motorist, IC 27-7-5-3 waives your uninsured motorist property damage deductible. Where it was not legally parked, that waiver does not apply. That waiver depends on there being a property claim to make. Where the owner or operator cannot be identified, subsection (c) imposes no liability on the insurer for the property claim in the first place.
In 2024 there were 26,804 hit-and-run collisions, accounting for 13% of all collisions in Indiana counties, in Indiana Crash Facts 2024. The report counts a hit-and-run as a collision where the driver leaves the scene without complying with the requirements in IC 9-26-1-1.1. The figure counts collisions of that kind, not deaths and not arrests.
Two things decide a Merrillville hit and run claim. The first is what Indiana required of the driver who left. The second is what your own policy says when that driver is never found. Blackburn Romey handles hit and run claims across Lake County, alongside the rest of our Merrillville personal injury work. If someone in your family was killed, the dates matter twice over. They decide which route the wrongful death claim takes, and how long is left to bring it, so have them on hand.
The consultation is free and confidential. We will look at what happened and give you a straight answer about whether there is a claim worth bringing. Call 833-366-6595, or contact us and tell us what happened.
If you or someone you love was recently injured in a motor vehicle accident, you can count on the Indiana car accident lawyers at Blackburn Romey.
Let our dedicated team of Indiana truck accident lawyers at Blackburn Romey handle your accident case for you. We meticulously investigate truck collisions.
Our experienced Indiana motorcycle accident lawyers can help those injured in motorcycle accidents to get the compensation they deserve.
After losing a loved one, there are many emotions to process and matters to figure out. You can count on our reputable Indiana wrongful death lawyers for help during this difficult time.
Having our experienced Indiana construction accident attorneys on your side, you can count on fierce and knowledgeable advocates who will stand up for your rights.
Our compassionate Indiana dog bite attorneys know how frightening and harmful a dog bite can be and are ready to pursue the compensation you deserve for your injuries.
If you were recently injured in a slip and fall accident, it’s time to get an Indiana Slip & Fall Lawyer on your side by contacting Blackburn Romey today.
If you or someone you love was recently injured in a bicycle accident, please know that the Indiana bicycle accident attorneys at Blackburn Romey are here for you.
The Indiana Brain Injury Lawyers of Blackburn Romey are ready to represent brain injury victims and seek the compensation they deserve.
Our Indiana spinal cord injury attorneys handle complex and high-value cases, and we are ready to help.
