Prominent Anderson attorney faces OWI, habitual offender counts

An Anderson attorney who is the son of the city’s mayor and served as a deputy city attorney faces drunken-driving charges after he was allegedly involved in a property damage crash. The Madison County Prosecutor’s Office also is seeking habitual offender status against the lawyer.

Evan B. Broderick, 36, was charged Monday in Madison Circuit Court with Class A misdemeanor operating a vehicle while intoxicated endangering a person, Class B misdemeanor leaving the scene of an accident, and refusing to submit to sobriety tests, an infraction. Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings’ office on Wednesday filed an additional notice of intent to seek habitual offender status in the case.   

Broderick was arrested Sept. 5 after Anderson and Edgewood police responded to calls regarding a vehicle that struck a pole. Police reports noted a trail of radiator coolant leading from the site of the crash to Broderick’s damaged vehicle in a nearby Wendy’s parking lot in Edgewood, just west of Anderson. The investigating Edgewood officer said Broderick told him, “I took the corner too fast and hit the curb and the wall.”

The officer said he smelled alcohol and Broderick appeared intoxicated. As the officer briefed Anderson police, the probable cause affidavit says, “Broderick stated he was going to phone someone to ‘take care of this.’” He later told the officer he was talking to an Anderson Police Department assistant chief “and asked if I would like to speak with him,” the officer wrote. “I declined to speak with whomever Mr. Broderick had called.”

The officer said Broderick refused to submit to sobriety tests, so a warrant was issued to obtain a blood draw at a hospital a couple of hours after the wreck. “During the entire time we were at the hospital, Mr. Broderick was threatening me and other staff present that he would be suing all people involved in this situation,” the officer wrote. The results of the blood test were not included in the charging information or probable cause affidavit.

After Broderick was transported to the Madison County Detention Center, the probable cause affidavit says, he began arguing with another arrestee in the book-in area, then “started a verbal confrontation with the Deputies” and initially refused to change into jail clothes. 

Broderick declined to comment Thursday. No attorney has filed an appearance in Broderick’s criminal case, according to online case records.

The Herald Bulletin of Anderson reported Broderick has been arrested twice since 2003 — once on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated and a few years later on suspicion of public intoxication. Neither of the charges were prosecuted, and those records were expunged in 2013. Broderick’s father, Anderson Mayor Tom Broderick, a Democrat, was Madison County prosecutor at the time of his son’s PI arrest, and decided not to file charges in that case, the newspaper reported. The younger Broderick also was arrested in Florida in 2001 on a misdemeanor battery charge in which prosecution was deferred.

Tom Broderick was unseated as prosecutor in 2014 by Cummings, a Republican who is serving in his fifth term as prosecutor since 1994. 

The Herald Bulletin also reported Evan Broderick has been suspended from his employment as an assistant city attorney, where he is supervised by Anderson city attorney Tim Lanane, who also serves as Minority Leader for Democrats in the Indiana Senate.

Lanane told the Herald Bulletin last week that Broderick had voluntarily admitted himself for treatment.