A car struck a child Saturday afternoon at the intersection of Hanna Street and East Maple Grove Avenue in southeast Fort Wayne, sending the child to a nearby hospital in serious condition. Police and emergency responders were dispatched to the scene around 1:45 p.m., according to Fort Wayne/Allen County communications and the Fort Wayne Police Department.
Limited information is available about the crash, according to WANE 15, which first reported the incident. The outlet has not released the child's age, and it remains unclear whether speed or driver distraction played any role in the collision.
The crash happened along a stretch of South Hanna Street that has already seen tragedy this year. The intersection sits in southeast Fort Wayne's Wayne Township, a residential area near community landmarks like Miss Virginia's Food Pantry, with South Hanna Street functioning as a major north-south residential arterial through the neighborhood.
A Corridor With A Recent History
Just two months earlier, on June 6, Fort Wayne police responded to another serious pedestrian incident a short distance away, at Hanna Street and East Sherwood Terrace, where an adult male pedestrian was struck and killed in a hit-and-run collision. The Fort Wayne Police Department located the suspect vehicle shortly after that crash.
Saturday's crash also lands in the middle of an unusually grim 48 hours for pedestrian safety across the city. On August 14, the day before the child was struck on Hanna Street, an adult female pedestrian suffered life-threatening injuries when she was hit by a Fort Wayne Community Schools bus at Coliseum Boulevard and Vance Avenue. The Fort Wayne Police Department's Fatal Accident Crash Team was paged to process that scene.
How Serious Crashes Get Investigated
For collisions involving serious or life-threatening pedestrian injuries, the Fort Wayne Police Department typically deploys its specialized Fatal Accident Crash Team along with an Air Support Division equipped with drones to reconstruct the scene, documenting vehicle trajectories and the point of impact. It has not been confirmed whether that team took over formal reconstruction of Saturday's Hanna Street crash.
Emergency medical response and trauma transport for critical crash victims in Fort Wayne are coordinated through the Three Rivers Ambulance Authority alongside the Fort Wayne Fire Department, with medics typically staging near active police scenes before transporting patients to local hospitals.
What Indiana Law Says About Drivers And Children
Under Indiana Code § 9-21-8-37, drivers are required to exercise due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian and must show proper caution specifically upon observing a child on or near a roadway. Separately, Indiana Code § 9-21-17-7 requires pedestrians crossing outside a marked or unmarked crosswalk to yield the right-of-way to oncoming vehicles, though drivers still retain a general statutory duty of care, according to the Delventhal Law Office. Indiana follows a modified comparative fault standard under which a party found more than 50% at fault cannot recover damages.
Fort Wayne's overall crash numbers underscore how frequent these incidents have become. The city recorded 9,143 police-reported traffic collisions in 2023, averaging roughly 25 crashes a day and accounting for about 72% of the 12,698 collisions reported across all of Allen County that year, per the same law office's data.
A Statewide Pattern Working Against Pedestrians
The trend extends beyond Fort Wayne. While national pedestrian fatalities saw a slight decrease in early 2024, Indiana recorded an increase over the same period, continuing to trail a decade-high 124 statewide pedestrian deaths in 2021, according to Glaser & Ebbs. Nationally, the Governors Highway Safety Association reported 3,304 pedestrian fatalities in just the first half of 2024.
As of Saturday, the child's precise condition beyond “serious” and their age had not been made public. Hoodline previously covered a similarly heartbreaking case, a fatal near east side crash involving a child pedestrian, underscoring how frequently these collisions have struck Indiana communities this year.
