You remember the impact, the wait for the ambulance, and then a police officer at the hospital telling you the driver who hit you had been drinking. What follows are two separate cases. One is the State of Indiana’s OWI prosecution of that driver, which is not yours to run. The other is a civil claim you bring yourself, for the harm done to you or to someone in your family. Blackburn Romey takes on the civil side for people hurt by impaired drivers in South Bend and across St. Joseph County. Call 833-366-6595 for a free, confidential consultation.
One whose only work is this kind of case. Every matter Blackburn Romey takes is a personal injury or wrongful death claim, so a drunk driving crash is never something picked up between other kinds of work. These claims sit inside the South Bend car accident work we do for this city, and inside our statewide car accident lawyer practice.
A South Bend claim is filed in St. Joseph County, which is why attorney Ryan Lindinger is worth naming here: he has been practicing law since 2006 and serves as a member of the St. Joseph County Bar Association, the bar association of the county where your case would be heard.
What a claim is worth depends on the medical records and on what the evidence shows, so no web page can put a figure on yours. A free, confidential consultation is the place to start. We will look at what happened and give you a straight answer about whether there is a claim worth bringing.
No more often than in Indiana as a whole, though alcohol turns up in a larger share of this county’s fatal collisions than it does statewide.
St. Joseph County recorded 7,338 collisions of every kind in 2024, the fifth-highest total of Indiana’s 92 counties, according to Indiana Crash Facts 2024. Of those, 100 were alcohol-impaired: 1.4% of the county’s collisions, below the statewide 1.7%, or 3,492 collisions, that year.
The fatal column reads differently. The county recorded 25 fatal collisions in 2024, and 3 of them were alcohol-impaired, or 12.0%, against 10.0% of fatal collisions statewide.
The label itself is narrow. Indiana Crash Facts 2024 defines it this way: “A collision is considered alcohol-impaired when at least one vehicle driver involved has a BAC test result at or above 0.08 g/dL. Driver BAC results greater than 0.59 g/dL are not included as impaired.” The state also cautions that the term “does not mean that a crash or fatality was caused by alcohol impairment, only that an alcohol-impaired driver was involved in the crash” (Indiana County Profiles 2023).
City figures come from that separate report and a different year. In 2023, South Bend recorded 3,025 total collisions, 57 of them alcohol-impaired, or 1.9%, measured against 125 of 7,459 collisions, or 1.7%, across St. Joseph County in the same year. Where a collision is fatal, what follows is a South Bend wrongful death claim rather than an injury claim.
Sometimes the business or the person who served the driver. Under Indiana’s dram shop statute, IC 7.1-5-10-15.5, a bar, restaurant, or private host who served the driver can also be responsible, but only if they actually knew the driver was visibly intoxicated when they served them, and that intoxication was a proximate cause (a direct legal cause) of the injuries you are claiming for. Those are narrow conditions, and meeting them is a question of evidence about how liability is established in the hours before the crash.
Your own conduct is weighed as well. Indiana compares fault in a claim against another driver, but not in a claim against a government body or a public employee, where the comparative fault chapter, IC 34-51-2-2, does not apply at all. Where it does apply, your own share of fault reduces what you recover (IC 34-51-2-5), and only a share greater than everyone else’s combined bars the claim entirely (IC 34-51-2-6(a)).
It runs on a separate track, but two things that happen inside it can reach your civil claim.
The first is a conviction. Causing serious injury or death while driving drunk is a felony in Indiana: a Level 5 felony under IC 9-30-5-4, where the injury is serious, and a Level 4 felony under IC 9-30-5-5, where someone is killed. A Level 5 felony is punishable by more than one year under IC 35-50-2-6(b).
If the driver is convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year in prison, the conviction is admissible in your civil case under IC 34-39-3-1 to prove the facts on which the conviction rested. This rule does not reach a Class A misdemeanor, which carries not more than one year under IC 35-50-3-2.
The second is restitution. If the court orders the driver to pay restitution in the criminal case, that does not close your civil claim for other damages (IC 35-50-5-3(e)).
To one of two courts, and not to the one you would pick. A civil injury claim from a South Bend crash is filed as a civil tort case in the St. Joseph Circuit Court or the St. Joseph Superior Court, where the relevant unit is the Civil Trial Division.
Which court receives a case is set by the county’s local rules, currently in effect as published by the Indiana Judicial Branch. Circuit Court receives 50% of all upper civil filings and Superior Court the other 50%, and Rule LR71-AR1-1001, Appendix A §III.3.F of the local rules assigns them in cycles of twenty, ten cases to each court.
Courts do sit in South Bend, and most of the county’s civil filings go into that cycle. One class of case does not. Under §III.3.E(a) of the same appendix:
“The City of Mishawaka, the School City of Mishawaka, or a resident of the City of Mishawaka where all defendants are residents of the City of Mishawaka shall designate all of their cases for filing with the Mishawaka Division of Superior and Circuit Courts.”
The word “all” carries that rule. A Mishawaka resident hurt in a crash must designate the case for the Mishawaka Division only where every defendant is also a resident of the City of Mishawaka. Where any defendant falls outside that condition, the claim stays in the county’s ordinary twenty-case rotation.
Whichever court the case lands in, it still has to be brought in time. Indiana gives you two years from when your claim arises to file an injury lawsuit (IC 34-11-2-4(a)). For most crash injuries, that means two years from the day of the crash, and that two-year period is Indiana’s filing deadline for personal injury claims generally.
Not to the law that applies. Both the St. Joseph Circuit Court and the St. Joseph Superior Court take civil tort filings, and the county’s local rules split them evenly in cycles of twenty. Neither you nor the driver’s insurer chooses between them; the rotation in the rule decides.
Two differences an ordinary crash claim does not have. There may be a second party to hold responsible, the bar, restaurant, or host who served the driver, and there is a criminal case running alongside yours that can produce a conviction admissible as evidence in it.
No. The county’s 100 alcohol-impaired collisions in 2024 describe a year of statewide data collection, and the definition behind the figure records only that an alcohol-impaired driver was involved, never that alcohol caused the crash. Your claim turns on the evidence from your own collision.
That turns on the defendants. The local rule designates a Mishawaka resident’s cases to the Mishawaka Division only where all defendants are residents of the City of Mishawaka. Where any defendant falls outside that condition, the claim goes into the county’s ordinary rotation between the Circuit and Superior Courts.
The ones the rotation sends there. Under the county’s twenty-case assignment cycle, one out of ten of the Superior Court’s share of civil filings goes to the Mishawaka Superior Court judge. That is the ordinary rotation at work, not the mandatory Mishawaka designation, which is a separate rule with its own condition.
Think carefully first. The adjuster who calls is the counterpart in your claim, not a neutral party, and a recorded statement given in the first days can be used later to argue your injuries are smaller than they are. It is worth getting legal advice before you answer.
Evidence from a drunk driving crash does not keep well. Crash reports, test results, and what witnesses remember are all easiest to secure early, and the two-year period has been running since your claim arose.
If a drunk driver hurt you or someone in your family in South Bend, call 833-366-6595 or contact us for a free, confidential consultation. Our South Bend personal injury practice covers the wider range of claims this city sends us, and we also serve clients in Fort Wayne, Merrillville, Indianapolis, Lafayette, Terre Haute, and Evansville.
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