“It was really important to me as a mom that my son did not die in vain,” says Beth McBride.
Every weekend, McBride and her daughter, Carli Seymour, search the Flathead Valley for vehicles left overnight in bar parking lots. When they find one, they leave the driver a note and $5 coffee gift card.
“I didn’t want him to just be another statistic of somebody killed by a drunk driver,” she adds.
In March 2023, a repeat drunk driver killed McBride’s son, Bobby Dewbre, on his 21st birthday, while he was out celebrating with friends. He was crossing the street to get a sober ride home.
The note contains a photo of Dewbre and tells the recipient how he died. Montana has one of the highest rates of DUI fatalities in the U.S.
“Bobby was an incredible young man,” McBride tells TODAY.com, remembering him as “super positive” and “fun to be around.”
According to data from the Montana Department of Public Health & Human Services, 19.5% of Montana adults report binge drinking at least once in the last month, over 4% higher than the national average.
Alcohol-related deaths among Montanans have been on the rise: There were 1,563 between 2009 and 2013, and 2,941 between 2019 and 2023.
“It sucks he can’t be here and that Bobby doesn’t get to be an adult,” Seymour tells TODAY.com. “When I think about where he would be right now, it stops me in my tracks. It freaking sucks so bad.”
“You can always kind of see these things happen to other people and picture how you might feel, but it is so enveloping,” she continues. “It’s the only it’s the only thing that you can think about. The only thing that you can do is be devastated.”
Early one morning, Seymour says she was driving to her mom’s home and spotted something different about a bar she passed.
“I noticed that there was a bar that had a lot of cars left overnight, and it was March, so it was cold in the morning,” she says, describing the frost on the car windows. “I could tell that they had been left from the night before. I just wanted to tell them thank you somehow.”
Seymour says Montanans are used to driving on long roads, “steeped in a drinking-and-driving culture.”
“You watch the adults in your life drink and drive,” she adds.
Seymour was working as a barista at a local coffee shop when her brother died. She asked what they could do to thank drivers who decided not to drive drunk. The coffee boost idea came naturally.
Sampson remembers the daughter of a former coworker: A drunk driver crashed his drunk into the bedroom of 15-year-old Erin Howk and killed her while she was asleep.
“That’s the culture that I grew up in. That’s the culture that other Montanans and other rural Americans have grown up in,” she continues. “It is inconvenient. It is a change from your normal routine, and so we wanted to give just a little sweetness to make that feel a little better.”
The idea is spreading: McBride says the 30-square-mile Flathead Valley currently has 75 volunteers and, as of today, 309 people have signed up.
They say Fairies are getting their wings across the U.S. — in Salem, Oregon; Las Vegas, Nevada; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Houston, Lansdale, Pennsylvania; Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; and Cleveland, Ohio.
“We have been told by people who have received cards over and over and over again that that card made them think,” McBride says, adding that multiple people have pledged to the organization that they’ll no longer drink and drive.
In 2025, the Montana Legislature passed House Bill 267, also known as “Bobby’s Law,” which strengthens the punishment for DUIs that result in death.
Seymour says, if rewarding a driver’s decision to find another way home prevents one more death, it’s worth it.
“I don’t want to absolve anybody of the responsibility for their own actions, but I do think it’s really important to kind of take a recovery standpoint from it,” she says. “Tomorrow’s a new day. We can all become better over time.”