An 18-year-old man is facing charges of underage driving while intoxicated and DWI after police allege that he drove his car into a parked school bus in Hillsborough Township shortly after 11 p.m. on June 19. Both the driver and a passenger suffered injuries in the accident.
Police responded to the scene of a one-vehicle crash on Farm Road. According to an investigation of the accident conducted by Hillsborough Township Police and a reconstruction team from the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office, a Nissan Altima was traveling eastbound and exited the road, traveling across grass, a sidewalk and a driveway for several hundred feet. The driver got the car back onto the road and then crashed into the back of a parked school bus. When police arrived, they found the car partially underneath the bus.
The driver and his 17-year-old female passenger were trapped in the car and had to be extracted by emergency services personnel. Both were transported to New Brunswick’s Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital for treatment. Neither of them had been wearing a seat belt.
A charge of DWI with a special circumstance can be added to an initial DWI charge. In this case, the underage driver was charged with two separate counts with one being for underage DWI. Another example would be a DWI with a death or injury, which could result in that charge for a driver in addition to the DWI charge. DWI charges can be contested with several defenses possible, including determining if BAC test results were inaccurate or if a charge was the result of improper police procedures.
Source: NJ.com, “Hillsborough teen changed with DUI and underaged DUI“, June 20, 2014
