Fort Wayne, IN : New Haven man charged with 6 felonies in head-on collision that killed 3 on state highway 1 on Saturday, April 4, 2015
A 26-year-old New Haven man accused of killing three people in a crash early Saturday faces six felony charges related to their deaths.
Authorities in Wells County charged Anthony W. Dager with three counts of causing death while operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, a Level 5 felony, and three counts of causing death while operating a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol level of .15 percent or more, a Level 4 felony.
According to documents filed with the charges, investigators said Dager was drunk when he crashed into another vehicle on Ind. 1 in northern Wells County, killing all three people inside that northbound car: driver Rebecca Prentice, 72, of Ossian; and passengers Paul Penrod, 64, of Murray; and Karen Smith, 65, of Bluffton. Those court filings also allege that Dager was deeply confused about his location at the time of the crash, which he told deputies occurred moments after he was fiddling with a smart phone behind the wheel.
The three people killed by the 4:45 a.m. crash were headed for Fort Wayne International Airport, where Smith and Penrod were to leave for a vacation in Hawaii. Prentice and Penrod died at the site of the crash, about a quarter-mile north of Wells County Road 1100 North on Ind. 1. Smith lived long enough to tell a medic about the wreck. Smith died about 2½ hours later at Lutheran Hospital.
Dager told a deputy at the crash site that he had been driving south when he looked up from his phone and saw Prentice’s northbound car in his lane, according to court filings. An Indiana State Police reconstruction team tells a different story. That reconstruction found that the car Dager was driving had veered far into the northbound lane of Ind. 1 when it crashed into the Prentice’s car.
According to court documents, Dager also told a deputy he was on Indianapolis Road, where he had been headed to work in Markle. The site of the crash is about six miles from Indianapolis Road and about 12 miles from Markle.
Shortly after the crash, a Wells County Sheriff’s deputy administered a preliminary breath test to Dager, which showed a blood alcohol content of .198 percent, more than twice the legal limit for a driver. Dager refused a blood test for police at Lutheran, but using a subpoena, deputies obtained blood results from a sample drawn by Lutheran staff during Dager’s treatment at 5:50 a.m. His blood alcohol content at that time was somewhere in a range from .216-.262 percent, according to police. A third blood sample and a urine sample were taken by a judge’s order at 7:30 a.m., but results of the third sampling had not been obtained by the time charges were filed.
Dager has since been released from the hospital and is in custody at the Allen County Lock-up. His bond in Wells County will be set at $100,000.
Source :
New Haven man charged with 6 felonies in head-on collision that killed 3 on state highway