Providence Hit-and-Run Accident Attorneys

The driver who hit you did not stop. That fact feels like the end of the claim, and in Rhode Island it usually is not. At Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers, our Providence car accident attorneys handle hit-and-run claims throughout Providence County. From our Rhode Island office in Woonsocket, we build these cases for people injured in hit-and-run crashes on Providence streets and highways.

Start with the correction that matters most, because it is stated backward on Rhode Island law firm websites, and it decides whether some people call a lawyer at all.

Insurance policies have long tried to define a hit-and-run vehicle as one that hits you, which conveniently excludes the driver who forces you into a barrier and keeps going. Rhode Island’s Supreme Court struck that requirement down in 1981, holding that the policy requirement of physical contact is void as against the policy inherent in the uninsured motorist statute. It said it was persuaded by the reasoning of the cases voiding physical contact as a condition of coverage in unidentified-motorist cases, and it decided a companion case the same way.

The Court also rejected the insurance industry’s stated reason for the rule, which was fraud prevention. The presence or absence of impartial witnesses, the Court wrote, the credibility of the claimant’s testimony, and the ability of a cross-examiner to expose prevarication are far more efficient tools for exposing fraud than a contact requirement.

So the honest statement of Rhode Island law is this. A phantom vehicle claim is available here. Independent corroboration makes a claim far stronger as a practical matter, because credibility is the whole battlefield, but it is not a legal precondition. If you read somewhere that Rhode Island “typically requires physical contact or corroborating evidence,” that is not the rule the Supreme Court announced.

Rhode Island’s uninsured motorist statute reinforces the point: it requires coverage for people legally entitled to recover from the owners and operators of uninsured motor vehicles and hit-and-run motor vehicles, and it contains no contact requirement, no phantom vehicle definition, and no corroboration requirement anywhere in its text.

One qualification, and it is a real one. The bodily injury side is what the above concerns. Rhode Island’s uninsured motorist property damage coverage is written differently: it carries a deductible, and the statute requires a claim to include the name, address, and other identification establishing that the at-fault operator was uninsured. So the no-contact rule protects your injury claim. Your car may be a separate conversation.

Rhode Island’s duties are specific, and the penalties for ignoring them are severe enough to be worth knowing.

A driver knowingly involved in a crash resulting in injury, serious bodily injury, or death must immediately stop at the scene or as close to it as possible. Leaving carries a mandatory license loss of at least one year and up to five, imprisonment of up to five years, and a fine of up to five thousand dollars. Where the crash caused serious bodily injury, a first offense carries one to ten years of imprisonment and a fine between one and five thousand dollars. Where someone died, a first offense carries two to fifteen years in state prison and a fine between five and ten thousand dollars, with a three-year license revocation. Second offenses in each tier go higher still.

A driver involved in a crash causing only damage to an attended vehicle must also stop, and faces a misdemeanor carrying a fine between five hundred and one thousand dollars, up to six months of license suspension, and up to six months of imprisonment.

Whether the crash caused injury or not, the driver must, on request, give their name, address, and vehicle registration number, show their license, render reasonable assistance to anyone injured, and immediately notify local or state police by the quickest available means. If the vehicle struck was unattended, the driver must locate the owner or leave a written notice in a conspicuous place on the vehicle and still notify police.

More common than the coverage suggests. Of the pedestrian and bicycle crashes recorded in Providence from 2010 through 2023, twenty-eight percent were hit-and-run.

North Main Street is the corridor where that statistic has a body count attached. Four pedestrians were killed on North Main Street in eighteen months, and three of those four were hit-and-run: Zachory Richardson in February 2023, Vanda Makovetskiy, who was eighty-five, in October 2023, and Edwin English in the early hours of New Year’s Eve that same year. A fourth, David Lynch, was killed in May 2024 by an allegedly drunk driver. North Main is a wide multi-lane arterial with highway-like geometry, long crossing distances and wide lanes, and a city council task force has since secured more than five million dollars in state and federal funding for improvements there.

Providence crashes involving people walking, biking, and scooting hit a sixteen-year high in 2025.

This is where the case actually lives. When the driver is never found, your recovery runs through your own uninsured motorist coverage, and there are Rhode Island rules that decide whether it works.

You do not have to sue the phantom driver first. Rhode Island’s statute expressly says a person entitled to recover shall not be required to make a claim against or bring an action against the uninsured or underinsured tortfeasor as a prerequisite to recovering from the insurer.

Whether you have the coverage at all is a question worth checking rather than assuming. Rhode Island requires insurers to offer uninsured motorist coverage in an amount equal to the insured’s liability limits, but a driver can select lower limits or reject the coverage entirely, in writing, and only after signing an advisory notice approved by the Department of Business Regulation about the hazard of uninsured and underinsured motorists. A rejection that was never properly documented is the standard Rhode Island attack on a denial that says you have no coverage. We look at the rejection paperwork before accepting the answer.

Do not let the carrier steer you off the uninsured motorist claim. We hear about this constantly: after a hit-and-run, the insured is told to use collision coverage for the car and medical payments coverage for the bills, and the uninsured motorist claim quietly never gets opened. Those coverages are not substitutes for each other. Collision pays for a vehicle. Medical payments coverage, which Rhode Island insurers must offer at a minimum of $2,500 per person and $5,000 in the aggregate and which many drivers rejected in writing years ago without remembering it, pays early bills regardless of fault. Neither one compensates you for what the crash did to you. The uninsured motorist claim is the one that does.

The deadline is not the one you think. Rhode Island treats a claim by an insured against their own carrier as a contract claim rather than a tort claim, which carries a far longer limitations period than the three years that applies to suing a driver. But your policy can impose its own shorter notice conditions, and a late notice is a real defense, so the right answer is to read the policy rather than to relax.

Hit-and-run cases get solved more often than people assume, and usually in the first two weeks.

Providence carries dense camera coverage. Rhode Island’s automated enforcement statutes expressly permit camera-produced evidence in civil proceedings under the ordinary rules of evidence, and the City’s recent procurement describes roughly thirty-three intersection safety cameras and twenty speed cameras. Private cameras matter more and vanish faster: businesses, garages, apartment buildings and transit vehicles commonly overwrite within one to four weeks.

Debris at the scene identifies vehicles. A broken mirror housing, a grille fragment, or a headlight lens carries part numbers that narrow a make, model, and year. Paint transfer on your vehicle does the same, which is a reason not to rush the repair. Body shops in the area, glass shops, and dealership service departments are worth canvassing. And a police report filed the same day is what makes any of the rest of it possible.

Hit-and-run cases are won in the first two weeks, on footage and debris that nobody else is preserving. Contact Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers for a free, confidential review, even if the police have told you the case is going nowhere. There is no fee unless we recover.

This page is attorney advertising and general information, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.