photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Dustin Rhodes Crowe, right, looks to a sheriff's deputy as he is taken into custody to serve more than 3 years in prison for his 5th, 6th, and 7th DUI and a charge for child endangerment on July 12, 2023, in Douglas County District Court.

A Eudora man who now has seven DUI convictions was sentenced to just over three years of incarceration on Wednesday in Douglas County District Court — after his wife asked for a higher sentence and said he’d put their young children’s lives at risk.

In June, Dustin Rhodes Crowe, 40, pleaded no contest to three felony DUIs and one felony count of endangerment of a child as part of a plea agreement, as the Journal-World reported. Prior to the agreement, he faced an additional two felony counts of aggravated endangerment of a child, one misdemeanor count of leaving the scene of an accident, one misdemeanor count of driving with an open container and one misdemeanor count of reckless driving.

With the addition of these three DUI incidents — on Nov. 28, 2022, and on March 15 and March 28 of this year — Crowe now has a total of seven DUI convictions on his record. But the child endangerment charges stem from the incident on March 28, when Crowe’s three children, ages 5, 8 and 10, were in the vehicle. On that day, Crowe is alleged to have driven off the roadway and into oncoming traffic on Kansas Highway 10 before driving into Lawrence and striking a parked car in the 500 block of Maine Street. Prosecutors said during Crowe’s plea hearing in June that his blood alcohol level was 0.34% on March 28: more than four times the legal limit of 0.08%.

At Crowe’s sentencing hearing on Wednesday, Assistant District Attorney Ricardo Leal read a letter to the court from Crowe’s wife, in which she wrote that Crowe’s decision to drive that day put all of their children’s lives at risk.

“I do not agree he should be charged with just one count of child endangerment,” the woman wrote in the letter. She wrote that their 10-year-old boy has nightmares about the crash and arrest, the 8-year-old feels “weird” and thinks people see her differently than before, and the 5-year-old has begun regularly acting out. And she said that the outcome on that day in March could easily have been much worse.

“He could have killed our three beautiful children,” she wrote.

Because of these factors, the woman wrote that she thought “Dustin deserves more time than what is agreed upon” — the three-year sentence that the state agreed to recommend in his plea agreement.

Before Judge Sally Pokorny sentenced Crowe on Wednesday, she asked if Crowe had anything to say.

“I apologize for everything,” Crowe said. “What my wife said is more of a punishment than anything.”

Pokorny then sentenced Crowe to a total of just over three years, with two of his DUI sentences running concurrently with another one. She implored Crowe to take advantage of any substance abuse programs he could while in prison, and she also ordered him to pay $2,930 in fines for each DUI, totaling $8,790.