Troopers stop wrong-way DUI driver on I-72 near Jacksonville

Illinois State Police troopers stopped a wrong-way DUI driver on Interstate 72 near Jacksonville early Sunday morning, cutting off a potential head-on crash in Morgan County before the vehicle reached traffic moving in the proper direction. The suspect vehicle still struck the passenger side of a trooper’s squad car, deploying the airbags and leaving the patrol unit with significant damage.

The trooper was not significantly injured, and separate local reporting described the injuries as minor. The driver was cited for DUI, and no other injuries were reported. On a high-speed corridor like I-72, a wrong-way vehicle can turn a routine patrol into an emergency in seconds. The Federal Highway Administration defines a wrong-way driving crash as one in which a vehicle travels against the legal flow of traffic on a high-speed divided highway or access ramp and collides with a vehicle going the correct direction.

The stakes are clear in national crash data. AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that six in 10 wrong-way crashes involved an alcohol-impaired driver. AAA also counted 2,008 deaths from wrong-way driving crashes on divided highways between 2015 and 2018, an average of about 500 deaths a year. That was 34% higher than the 2010-2014 annual average of 375 deaths.

Illinois’ 2022-2026 Strategic Highway Safety Plan sets a goal of zero roadway fatalities and says that goal depends on collaboration across hundreds of federal, state, county and municipal agencies and safety organizations. In Morgan County, that broader safety push was visible in the split-second response that kept the wrong-way driver from meeting westbound or eastbound traffic head-on on I-72. The result was a damaged squad car and a DUI citation, not a fatal pileup on one of the county’s busiest highways.