Alec and Lydia Act of 2026, Arizona

The Alec and Lydia Act, 2026 Arizona.

A mother turned her grief into advocacy. In May of 2024, Hope Hooton lost both of her children in the most devastating way a parent can lose a child. Her son Alec and her daughter Lydia were killed by their dad during what was supposed to be a routine, court-approved parenting visit. He then took his own life. Dad had been hospitalized recently for bipolar disorder. He had disclosed both suicidal and homicidal ideation. And somewhere between that hospitalization and the visit that killed his children, the system did not treat that history as an active risk but as a past event.

Hope Hooton went to the Arizona Capitol again and again and asked, why the warning signs in her children's father's history hadn't translated into more caution in the courtroom during custody decisions.

What emerged from her perseverance is historic within the Arizona Family Court system. House Bill 2995, better known as the Alec and Lydia Act, was signed by Governor Hobbs on June 22, 2026. It is bound to change how the law views coercive control and emotional/domestic violence and will hopefully give life to countless children and their safe parent currently trapped in high-conflict divorce and custody cases.

The law changes how Arizona family courts are required to weigh domestic violence history when deciding custody and parenting time:

- It defines coercive control as its own form of abuse — the pattern-based, non-physical kind that doesn't show up as a bruise but is dangerous, and equally diagnostically relevant when a clinician is assessing risk.

- It creates a presumption against awarding custody or joint decision-making to a parent with a documented history of domestic violence, shifting the burden onto that parent to demonstrate safety rather than requiring the other parent to prove danger after the fact.

- It states that a child's safety outweighs Arizona's preference for 50/50 custody arrangements.

With an emergency clause, the law took effect immediately, applying to cases already open in the courts and new filings.

This law will help make sure that when a documented history exists — a hospitalization, a disclosure of homicidal ideation, a pattern of coercive control — the family court is required to treat it as legally significant. That's a meaningful shift. It doesn't replace a psychiatric evaluation, but it does mean the evaluation, once it exists, is relevant.

Why the name matters:

A law that is named after two children instead of getting labeled with a sterile statute number is symbolic and important. Every time a judge, an attorney, or an evaluator says "the Alec and Lydia Act" out loud, we're saying the names of two children who didn't get to grow up. That is Hope Hooton's life work. None of this undoes what happened to Alec and Lydia. Nothing could. But a change in law that asks the legal system to take a documented risk history seriously is significant and will save the lives of countless other children.