JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri prison guards are criticizing the Department of Corrections director, who was photographed at a September golf fundraiser holding a beer while wearing a shirt with the department logo.

Prison employee union chief Gary Gross says employees would face discipline if they were pictured doing the same thing in their uniforms.

Corrections spokeswoman Karen Pojmann said Precythe was not wearing a department uniform but a shirt with a department logo made by state inmates and sold to state employees.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — A 49-year-old Columbia woman has pleaded not guilty to the sex trafficking of her mentally disabled daughter.

Renee Collins entered the plea Tuesday to sex trafficking of a child and endangering the welfare of a child.

Collins and her boyfriend were accused of trafficking her daughter from a room in The Welcome Inn in Columbia in exchange for drugs and money.

Collins’ daughter has cerebral palsy and functions at the level of a 2 or 3-year-old.

The FBI notified Columbia police in July 2017 that it had received a tip that the child was being left in a motel room with strange men.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Democrat Laura Kelly accused Republican Kris Kobach of not being truthful when he claimed during a televised debate Tuesday that Kansas can save $377 million a year by cutting off benefits and services to immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

Kobach, in turn, argued that Kelly was lying when she said that he wants to cut school spending.

The contentious exchanges came as the candidates for Kansas governor faced questions about taxes, school funding and immigration in a hotly contested race where Kelly previously accused Kobach of not supporting public education, and Kobach has tried to translate a rally with President Donald Trump into momentum in the campaign’s final weeks. The debate at television station KWCH in Wichita also included independents Greg Orman and Rick Kloos and Libertarian Jeff Caldwell.

Kelly contended the claim that the state could save millions by cutting off benefits to immigrants is untrue because people living in the U.S. illegally are not eligible for welfare benefits.

The other testy exchange occurred during questions about school funding and whether the candidates favored returning to the tax-cutting experiment of former Gov. Sam Brownback.

“When we talk about going back to the Brownback experiment, which is what Kris Kobach wants to do, we are talking about cutting our schools again — so we go back to larger class sizes, programs being cut, teachers leaving our state,” Kelly said. “We don’t want that, we can do better for our kids.”

Kobach argued the state has to be smart on how it spends money on education so more of it goes into the classroom, and he hit back on the contention he wants to cut funding.

“Ms. Kelly continues to repeat a lie over and over again … claiming I say schools are overfunded and I want to cut school spending. That is a falsehood. I have never said that,” Kobach said.

Kansas legislators have boosted spending on public schools in response to rulings in recent years by the state Supreme Court in a lawsuit filed by four local school districts. Lawmakers this year phased in a $548 million increase over five years to avoid raising taxes.

Kobach has criticized the court for its rulings and has suggested this year’s increase in spending amounted to a “ransom.” He’s also been sharply critical of how some school districts spend their dollars and argues that they wouldn’t need big increases if they spent more money in the classroom.

The Republican has said he wants to require districts to spend 75 percent of their dollars in their classrooms. The State Department of Education said they spend about 61 percent on classroom instruction alone, a figure that does not include spending on support staff such as nurses and counselors.

Kelly and Kobach have sparred over her claim in television ads that he is calling schools overfunded. Kobach said he hasn’t used those words and demanded that she change the ad. He has also been critical of how the state funds education and how school districts spend taxpayer money.

Kobach, secretary of state since 2011, is nationally known for advocating tough immigration and voter identification policies and was Trump’s most visible early supporter in Kansas. He served as vice chairman of the president’s now-disbanded election fraud commission and narrowly won the GOP primary over Gov. Jeff Colyer after Trump tweeted his endorsement the day before the election.

Kelly first won her Senate seat in her GOP-leaning Topeka area district in 2004, and she’s the top Democrat on the Senate budget committee.

Orman, a Kansas City-area businessman, received national attention as an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2014 against veteran Republican incumbent Pat Roberts. Enough Democrats rallied behind him then that the Democratic nominee dropped out, though Roberts still won. Democrats now largely view Orman as a potential spoiler.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — A 56-year-old man has been sentenced to four years in prison for dumping a woman’s body on the side of a southwest Missouri road.

Russell Hercher was sentenced Friday after he pleaded guilty to abandonment of a corpse after the death of 20-year-old Devin Zoey Briley.

Briley’s body was found in December 2017 on a Greene County road west of Springfield.

Greene County Sheriff’s Office said at the time that Briley likely died from a drug overdose.

Authorities were able to identify Briley using a fingerprint-scanning device.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — A 46-year-old Missouri man is charged with making a hoax emergency call in Overland Park, Kansas.

Johnson County charged Morayonla Olubori Sholaja, of Grandview, Missouri, with one count of giving a false alarm. He is accused of calling 911 with a false claim of an “active shooter” in Overland Park.

Sholaja is accused for calling 911 dispatchers Nov. 7 and saying an armed man was threatening people.

More than a dozen officers with weapons drawn responded and several schools were locked down until police decided the call was a hoax.

A warrant for Sholaja in April. He was arrested last week in Missouri and brought to Johnson County Monday after waiving his right to fight extradition.

He is being held on a bond of $50,000.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The rate of Kansas infants dying from a lack of oxygen more than doubled in just three years, according to data released last month.

The Kansas State Child Death Review Board’s analysis of 2016 child deaths found that 20 children died from unintentional asphyxia, such as suffocation, strangulation or choking. The finding is a small fraction of the state’s 394 child deaths in 2016, but the rate of death from asphyxia has grown steadily since 2013.

Sixteen of the 20 Kansas asphyxia deaths involved a child less than 1 year old, while 17 of the deaths were sleep-related. Most of the sleep-related deaths occurred when a child wasn’t sleeping in a crib or bassinet, but shared a sleeping surface with another person, according to state figures.

“I think the increase in sleep-related deaths and the unintentional asphyxia deaths is very concerning,” said Christy Schunn, director of the KIDS Network, an infant death prevention group in Kansas.

The state’s rate of unintentional asphyxia death in 2005 was 5.2 per 100,000 population for children less than 1 year old, according to the report. The death rate in 2016 was 41.9 per 100,000.

The findings mirror a rise nationally in the rate of sleep-related infant deaths, which increased between 2013 and 2015, according to a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released earlier this year.

Wichita pediatrician Katherine Melhorn, who’s also an expert on child abuse injuries and child neglect, is working to inform families about “the danger of sleeping with your babies.”

Babies don’t have the strength and agility to move out from under a pillow or an arm, which can suffocate them, she said. Part of the issue is that new parents are exhausted and will often do whatever they can to get sleep, including allowing their baby to sleep with them.

Melhorn warned that a child is “too young to get themselves out of a bad situation.”

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — A former Missouri state trooper was sentenced to seven years in federal prison without parole for transmitting sexually explicit photos of a teenage victim.

Forty-seven-year-old Justin Watson, of Mountain View, also was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years of supervised release following incarceration.

Watson pleaded guilty in May 2018 to receiving and distributing child pornography. He admitted he took sexually explicit photos of a 17-year-old juvenile on the victim’s iPhone and transmitted the images to his own cell phone.

Watson has been charged in Howell County with four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and one count of sexual contact with a student.

He was a patrol trooper from 1995 until he was dismissed in October 2017. He also was a high school baseball umpire in the Mountain View-Birch Tree School District.

PAULS VALLEY, Okla. (AP) — A suspect has been arrested in Oklahoma in the deadly shooting of a southwest Missouri couple who were killed when they interrupted a robbery at their home.

The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office says Billy Sage Medley was arrested early Tuesday in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma. He is charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Joe and Brandy Allen. The sheriff’s office says the Allens were killed last month at their home in the town of Tunas during an apparent gunfight. Their pickup truck was taken.

Another suspect, Jeffrey Dale Lee Stevenson, was arrested last week and also is charged with the couple’s deaths. Two others are charged with abandonment of corpse for allegedly visiting the homicide scene without telling authorities they had seen the bodies.