Bar Fairies and Bar Flies
The Mother-Daughter duo advocating for
DUI Reform across the state of Montana
Written by: Maggie Mehler
My alarm clock begins its harassment promptly at 5:00 a.m., an ungodly hour for any noise at all on Sunday morning. Unwilling to open my eyes yet, I bumbled around my room pulling on fleece lined pants, two jackets, and my largest, thickest pair of socks. Yawn, groan, choke down some coffee; time to head to the bars.
Somehow, I had roped my roommate into joining, and we sat quietly on the drive to The Cat’s Paw. I was excited, it would be our first time volunteering with the Montana Bar Fairies. The operation was relatively simple: 1- get to the Cat’s Paw (check), 2- locate vehicles presumably left by owners too inebriated to drive, and 3- leave a little thank-you.
The thank-you is a gift card that gets stashed under the windshield wipers. On one side, it’s a coffee voucher, and on the other side it tells a story:
“I was hit and killed by a drunk driver on my 21st birthday while crossing the street to get into my sober ride home”
The message on these cards comes from Bobby Dewbre, who was killed in March of 2023. The story became the inspiration for Montana Bar Fairies.
“Right after Bobby died, I was spending a lot of time over at my mom’s house. There was a morning where I drove over bright and early on a Saturday morning, and I saw when I passed a local bar that there were a few cars left in the parking lot,” said Bobby’s sister, Carlie Seymour. “I just wished there was a way to say thank you to those people for not driving home.”
Talking with her mother, Beth McBride, a plan began to bloom. “It’s helpful to have something to put all this excess energy into,” said Seymour, “You know, when you feel like the world is ending, if you have something you can pour into it makes that process a little bit easier.”
Who doesn’t need a coffee after a long night of drinking, thought McBride and Seymour. In the beginning, the duo financed the project themselves, paying out of pocket for the coffee voucher cards that they would leave on windshields. Eventually, they began to receive donations from Copper Mountain and Florence Coffee Company (shops local to McBride and Seymour in the Flathead Valley). The process wasn’t without its struggles, but McBride and Seymour were persistent.
“Every time I’ve wanted to give up, she didn’t. Then, there were times where she felt like ‘oh my gosh, this is a lot’, but we’ve been able to keep each other grounded through the process,” said Seymour.
The Dewbre family also wanted to remind people what a frequent and pervasive problem drunk driving is in Montana. “When something like this happens, it’s the one thing everybody’s talking about for three weeks. And then the news cycle changes or somebody else dies and you kind of forget. These victim cards just keep that person’s memory and that story in the cultural conversation,” said McBride.
The Bar Fairies have received messages that their cards are being kept on refrigerators and dashboards as a constant reminder not to drink and drive. “It’s not shaming anybody. It’s simply just rewarding what we view as positive behavior,” said McBride.
In the past few years, the operation has grown immensely.
There are now volunteers distributing cards across the state, there’s even a few fairies in Tacoma, Washington. The Montana Bar Fairies have connected with other families of drunk-driving victims whose stories are now displayed on coffee cards like Bobby’s.
“We’re not campaigning to reach people who already agree with us. We’re trying to talk to people who drink and drive and see if we can’t make a difference in how they view that behavior and how serious it is. How the risk isn’t worth the reward. That’s the goal,” said McBride.
McBride and Seymour have expanded their work outside of coffee cards in recent months, to raise awareness about the grossly neglected issue of drunk driv- ing in Montana. A 2024 state ranking from Forbes stated that Montana is the worst state for drunk driving by two measures: 8.57 drunk drivers are involved in fatal crashes for every 100,000 licensed drivers, and 7.14 people are killed in crashes involving a drunk driver for every 100,000 residents. Both of these are the highest rates in the nation.
Similarly, Montana has a disproportionately minimal punishment for first-time DUI offenders when compared to other states. Arizona requires a minimum of ten days jail time, while Montana only requires twenty-four hours, and Virginia residents can be fined up to $2,500 as opposed to our $1,085.
Early this year, a Center for Disease Control study found that 26.8% of people who live in Gallatin County drink excessively.
Excessive drinking can mean binge drinking: five or more standard drinks in one evening for a man, four or more drinks for a woman; or heavy drinking: 15 or more drinks per week for a man, eight or more drinks for a woman. This statistic qualifies Gallatin as the ‘drunkest county’ in the United States.
Montana’s DUI laws work in favor of drunk drivers because of their leniency. This was the case for the defendant in Bobby’s case, who was charged with a misdemeanor offense of Careless Driving Involving Death or Serious Bodily Injury (Montana Code Annotated §61-8-716). The offender, John Lee Wilson, served just six months jail time for the offense.
‘Negligence’ in this instance refers to Wilson’s high BAC. Wilson didn’t intend for his driving to have fatal consequences, so he could only be charged with a misdemeanor. “There was a problem with me and that law,” said McBride.
McBride and Seymour have been working on a new project this past year; House Bill 267. Commonly called ‘Bobby’s Law’, the bill would recognize a high blood alcohol concentration in fatal accidents as ‘inherent gross negligence’, turning Wilson’s actions into a felony charge.
“If you were going to write: ‘How to Bring a Bill to the House for Dummies, it would be this,” said McBride, while explaining her process as a civilian-turned-lobbyist over the past year. She begins by explaining that all bills need a legislator to back them up. This step was relatively simple for McBride because local Columbia Falls representative, Braxton Mitchell (R), grew up just down the street from Dewbre and knew the family well.
“I think for something like this, where you’re double the legal limit, and you’re knowingly getting into a vehicle and you kill somebody, I just don’t understand how after all these years people pretty much just get a slap on the wrists and never face accountability for it,” said Mitchell.
He’s been working with McBride to draft the bill in recent months and presented the bill to the House this past February. “I should be able to get both of these through no problem just because I think people are starting to realize how lax our DUI laws are,” said Mitchell while discussing Bobby’s Law and another DUI bill.
The process has been far from easy for McBride and Seymour. The pair worked tirelessly to gather support from their community in the Flathead Valley; gathering volunteers, funding, and people to attend the Bill’s hearing in the house. Mitchell told McBride and Seymour they should gather close to a hundred people for the hearing.
They asked people to write to their representatives, call, and if they didn’t know who their representatives were, the Montana Bar Fairies would find the representatives for them. “You just have to be patient, and you have to be persistent,” said McBride.
Vouching for themselves on social media and texting every contact in their phones, the Montana Bar Fairies gathered over eighty bill-supporters on hearing day. “We worked during the day at our regular jobs and almost every night until we fell asleep,” said McBride.
In addition, the Montana Bar Fairies were present at every single community event they could participate in. They participated in the Walk Like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) parade, the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the 4th of July parade, even the Whitefish Winter Carnival. At the hearing to push the bill through the house, more than eighty volunteers were present.
Most recently, the bill is sitting in a hearing with the House of Appropriations to debate financial repercussions. If the bill passes through the appropriations committee, it will go on to the Senate floor and then to the governor’s desk. “It gives me faith in myself and Montana citizens, that when this bill passes through the Senate and across Gianforte’s desk and he signs it into law, I will go on,” said McBride.
“I desire to enjoy my life again someday.”
The goal is to give justice to the families of victims. “As a parent, you can’t ever imagine losing a child. But when it happens, it’s apparent that you can,” said McBride. McBride recounts reading many different books about grief, and the best way to work through it. She recounts that many of these books recommend trying to make the world a better place as a legacy for your loved one.
“I have to admit, today I got a text from someone that said, ‘Bobby is really proud of you’ and I got so deeply saddened. I would rather have Bobby here than win this because Bobby died.” The work for the Montana Bar Fairies is far from over. The bill has yet to be passed, and volunteers will continue to Fairy across the state.