Missouri’s New DWI Laws Took Effect August 28: Child Maintenance for Orphaned Children and a New Class A Felony

Two Missouri laws that took effect on August 28, 2026 change what a drunk-driving death costs the driver. One creates a new class A felony, with at least ten years before parole, for a repeat offender who kills. The other, named for two boys from Jefferson County, orders a driver who kills a parent to pay child maintenance to the children left behind, calculated the same way child support is calculated in a divorce.

On April 13, 2021, a driver with a blood alcohol content of .192 struck a family’s vehicle on Highway 30 in Byrnes Mill. Cordell Williams, Lacey Newton, and their four-month-old son were killed. Their two older sons, Bentley and Mason, survived and went to live with their grandmother, Cecilia Williams of Bonne Terre. The driver was convicted of three counts of second-degree involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to eight years, according to the Leader, the Jefferson County newspaper that has followed the case since the crash.

Mrs. Williams spent the next four legislative sessions asking Missouri to adopt what Tennessee had adopted in 2022: a requirement that a drunk driver who kills a parent support the victim’s children. This year the General Assembly agreed, by votes of 29 to 0 in the Senate and 127 to 2 in the House. The statute carries her grandsons’ names.

This post explains what the child-maintenance law actually requires, how it interacts with the wrongful-death claim a family would ordinarily bring, what the companion sentencing bill changed, and what both mean for families on either side of a fatal crash. The two laws were enacted together and the statutory history credits all three bills, HB 1740, SB 1135, and SB 1421, so you will see them cited together.

Bentley and Mason’s Law: child maintenance from the driver

The new statute, RSMo § 454.1050, applies when a person is convicted of, or pleads guilty or no contest to, driving while intoxicated or driving with excessive blood alcohol content under sections 577.010 or 577.012, and the offense caused the death of a child’s parent or guardian. If a surviving parent or guardian petitions, the court is directed to order the driver to pay maintenance for each of the victim’s children until the child is an adult.

The word “maintenance” is doing the same work it does in a family case. The statute borrows its machinery from Missouri child support law and, in several respects, copies it.

How the amount is set

The court is directed to consider the child’s financial needs and resources, the surviving parent or guardian’s resources, the standard of living the child would have enjoyed, the child’s physical and emotional condition and educational needs, the custody arrangement, and the reasonable cost of work-related child care. It is also told to consider the child support guidelines in section 452.340 and Supreme Court Rule 88.01 and Civil Procedure Form 14. That is the worksheet used in every Missouri divorce and paternity case, and it means the number will be driven largely by the driver’s income and the number of children, with the same disputes about gross income, imputed income and childcare that arise in ordinary support litigation.

How long it lasts

The obligation runs until the child dies, marries, enters active military service, or turns eighteen. As with ordinary child support, it continues to age twenty-one if the child is still in secondary school at eighteen, or enrolls in a vocational or higher-education program by the October 1 following graduation and carries at least twelve credit hours. It may continue indefinitely for a child who is physically or mentally incapacitated from self-support, insolvent and unmarried. Any arrearage that accrues survives the termination date.

What happens while the driver is in prison

The legislature anticipated the obvious objection. A driver who has just killed someone is usually going to prison, and prison wages do not pay child support. Under subsection 8, a person who is incarcerated has up to one year after release to begin paying, including any arrearage that accumulated while incarcerated. The obligation is deferred, not forgiven, and it attaches the day the driver walks out.

How it interacts with a wrongful-death lawsuit

This is the part most likely to matter in practice, and the part most likely to be handled badly. Families of a person killed by a drunk driver already have a civil claim under Missouri’s wrongful death statute, and in most cases the driver’s auto liability insurance is the only real source of recovery. The new statute sets rules for how the two remedies fit together.

The sequencing decision is therefore a real one. A family that settles the civil claim quickly for policy limits may find that the settlement has been credited against the maintenance obligation, or that a judgment taken first has extinguished the maintenance remedy altogether. A family that petitions for maintenance first preserves a stream of payments that begins when the driver is released and is enforceable through wage withholding. Which path is better depends on the driver’s insurance limits, assets, sentence, and likely earning capacity on release. It is a decision to make with counsel before anything is signed.

Enforcement and modification

The order is enforceable the way child support is enforceable. The director of the Family Support Division may issue income-withholding orders against the driver’s wages up to the federal garnishment limits. Under subsection 10, the order may be modified only on “changed circumstances so substantial and continuing as to make the terms unreasonable,” which is the same standard that governs any Missouri support order.

One point the statute leaves open is procedure. It says a surviving parent or guardian “files a petition,” but does not say in which court, or whether the petition is filed in the criminal case or as a separate civil action. Until the courts or the Supreme Court’s rules committee address this, expect practice to vary by circuit.

HB 1740: longer sentences for drivers who kill

The companion bill, sponsored by Representative Dave Griffith of Jefferson City and known in the press as Melanie’s Law for Melanie Wankum, a Jefferson City woman who died in an October 2022 crash caused by an impaired driver, rewrote the penalty ladder in RSMo § 577.010. Missouri already escalated DWI charges based on prior offenses and on injury or death. The new version moves several rungs up and adds one at the top.

A class A felony in Missouri carries ten to thirty years or life. Before this change, the most serious DWI homicide charge available without proving a higher mental state was a class C felony, which the Senate summary of the bill notes carried a range of three to ten years. The bill also requires an ignition interlock device for a first-time offender whose blood alcohol content was .15 or higher, according to the governor’s office and press accounts; the interlock provisions live in chapter 302 and are worth reading in full before relying on any summary of them.

Some early coverage reported that the class A felony is triggered by a blood alcohol content of .15 or by multiple deaths. The statute as codified ties it to a prior class B-level conviction, and the Senate’s own summary says the same. Where a news account and the statute disagree, the statute controls.

Where Missouri fits nationally

Tennessee enacted the first law of this kind in 2022 and named it for three children, one of whom was Bentley Williams; Mrs. Williams had campaigned there first. Stateline, the nonprofit state-policy newsroom, reported in early 2024 that Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas had passed versions and that legislators in roughly a dozen more states had introduced them. Counts vary by source. Press accounts this year put the number of states with such a law at five or six before Missouri, while Mothers Against Drunk Driving, an advocacy organization that supports these laws, lists seven. Missouri is somewhere between the sixth and the eighth state to adopt one; we have not found a neutral source that has settled the tally.

The policy debate around these statutes is not really about whether the children deserve support. It is about whether a maintenance order against a defendant with no assets and a prison sentence produces money or only paperwork, and whether the offsets against civil judgments and insurance mean the family is reshuffling the same dollars. Missouri’s answers are the deferral until release, the wage-withholding mechanism, and the exclusion of crime-victim compensation from the offset. Whether they work will be visible in the first cohort of orders, several years from now.

For scale, Missouri recorded 909 traffic deaths in 2025, the third straight annual decline, according to the Missouri Department of Transportation. The Missouri Coalition for Roadway Safety reports that impaired driving accounts for roughly eighteen percent of the state’s traffic fatalities, and the Highway Patrol made more than 7,700 impaired-driving arrests in 2024.

A maintenance order and a wrongful-death settlement draw on the same pool of money. The order in which a family pursues them can decide how much of that pool the children actually see.

What families should know

If you are raising children whose parent was killed by an impaired driver in an incident on or after August 28, 2026, you now have two remedies rather than one, and they interact. Before accepting an insurance settlement or taking a civil judgment, ask how the maintenance remedy would be affected. Ask what the driver’s sentence is likely to be and what the driver is likely to earn on release, because that determines whether the maintenance order has value. And make sure the children’s own affairs are in order: a guardianship or conservatorship may be needed to receive and manage the payments, and a trust may be the right vehicle for a settlement.

If you have been charged with a DWI involving a death or serious injury, understand that the sentencing exposure changed on August 28 and that a plea negotiated on the old ranges is no longer available for new conduct. The prior-conviction trigger for the class A felony makes the accuracy of your criminal history a central issue. And a guilty plea to a qualifying offense now carries a civil consequence, the maintenance obligation, that a plea agreement should address rather than ignore.

This article is educational and is not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship. Statutes summarized here took effect August 28, 2026, have not yet been interpreted by Missouri’s appellate courts, and may be amended. Criminal charges carry serious penalties, and civil deadlines are short. Verify the current text with the Missouri Revisor of Statutes and consult an attorney about your own situation.