A sleepless, terrifying night ends with good news for Arizona family

They moved to the country for a simpler life, a safer life.

But in an instant − a quick trip to the bathroom and a diaper change on April 14 − their 2-year-old son vanished. By nightfall, their property would swarm with loudspeakers, lights, officers, search dogs, drones and volunteers from Prescott.

By the following day, strangers on the internet were already questioning their parenting and their motives for reporting their son missing.

Bodin Rain Allen was born July 15, 2022, in Kingman, Arizona, a day when his dad, Corey, saw double rainbows. Bodin was his mother’s first natural birth after three C-sections, defying doctors’ expectations of what was possible.

Corey and his wife Sarah knew they wanted Bodin two years before he was a line on a pregnancy test.

They knew they wanted Bodin to grow up surrounded by the quiet expanse of the high desert, not the noisy, messy buzz of city life where screen time is so often a babysitter. So his childhood has been filled with romping and biking among the junipers and the dirt with his dog.

So Sarah wasn’t worried when she heard the door open and close while she was in the bathroom. She didn’t think much of it when Bodin didn’t return inside as she changed his baby brother’s diaper either.

A few moments later, she stepped outside to find Bodin. She checked behind the red truck, searched around the bushes. She hollered.

It was 3:30 p.m. She called her sister. Did he wander next door to her place? No.

She and her husband Corey kept hollering. Nothing. By about 4:30 p.m., the rest of their kids had come home from school and joined the search.

Sarah called the Seligman Fire Department.

“My instinct was maybe he got trafficked or something. And he could be states away. Who knows what’s going on? And that feeling just kept intensifying by the minute,” Corey said.

Like a movie

The Seligman Fire Chief rang the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office right after Sarah called him.

Sgt. Blake Lanoue in Prescott sent out alerts to the 200 volunteers they rely on for missing person searches — everyday people with skills in tracking, rock climbing, off-road driving, or sometimes simply just not tiring out.

Forty of them dropped what they were doing and hit the road. Within a couple hours, they met Lanoue and his team, along with search squads from the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the Coconino Sheriff’s Department, on the Allen property about 40 miles east of Kingman.

Lanoue’s team established a command post and recorded a message from Sarah to broadcast over loudspeakers, urging Bodin to come home. They also queued up the theme song from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, his favorite show, to play across the land.

Maybe he’d follow the tune and emerge from a hiding spot, they thought.

A social media post announcing the missing boy circulated. It had his name spelled wrong: “Boden.” Sarah didn’t have the energy to correct them. His picture was out there, and that was what mattered.

To Corey, it felt like a movie.

Search and rescue teams rely on an algorithm built from decades’ worth of behaviors from lost people. It adjusts based on factors like age and health, helping teams estimate how far someone is likely to travel based on how long they’ve been missing.

As time passes, search crews expand their radius based on that algorithm.

The algorithm did not work on Bodin.

At about 1 a.m., Sarah said investigators interrogated her outside, probing every detail of her day before Bodin went missing. They separated Corey and questioned him in the same way.

They had already pulled everything out of the cabinets, searched under the couch and checked inside the washer five times. At some point, someone started taping areas that had already been checked, but then someone else would still check those places. It felt as though they were looking for a place to hide a body, not searching for a living child, Sarah said.

“And we’re just bawling our eyes out in the weakest moment of our lives and I feel like I’m about to be ended as a person. Just an empty vessel,” Corey said. “I’m trying to hold my son in my arms and he’s not there.”

Meanwhile, Bodin was wandering under the full moon, somewhere in the seven miles between the Allen property and a ranch guarded by a 150-pound dog named Buford. Bodin was dressed only in pajama bottoms, a tank top, and sneakers.

A big heart and a big job

Buford is a 7-year-old Anatolian Pyrenees with smokey blond fluff and dark grey patches on his back, head and ears. His dark eyes have known lifetimes.

He’s always been laid back. His family says he never went through the typical raptor phase most puppies do, where their teeth are like tiny knives and they constantly try to chew on your hands.

Buford loves belly rubs—scratch the right spot, and his back leg kicks uncontrollably while he snorts. But he also loves to work.

He patrols the 25,000-acre ranch to keep coyotes and mountain lions from eating the ranch animals. He cuddles newborn calves to keep them warm. He instinctively started caring for the babies when he was just a year old.

He takes his job of protecting calves seriously: the only human he’s ever bitten was the butcher.

Dawn Dunton, Buford’s human mama, saw the poster about Bodin on Facebook in the early hours of April 15.

A little boy named “Boden Allen” was missing, last seen about 10 miles down I-40 from her ranch. She mentioned it to her husband Scotty.

At about 8 a.m., Scotty was getting ready to go into town and saw Buford coming down the fence line with a little blonde boy.

“Not that many 2-year-olds running around out here, so it didn’t take long to figure out who it was,” Scotty said.

Bodin was cold and sobbing. Scotty scooped him up and brought him inside, sat him down, and poured him several glasses of water, which Bodin eagerly drank. He handed him a few string cheeses to eat and then called the Mohave County Sheriff’s Department.

Some folks from Lanoue’s team rushed to the ranch, bearing bananas for the dehydrated boy.

And then they took him home.

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Natural instincts

Around that same time, Sarah and Corey’s eyes met. They hadn’t slept. They hadn’t even really seen each other that night.

“I’ve just had the most emotional meltdown. I’ve never cried that hard,” Corey said.

Within the hour, at about 8:40 a.m., they got a message. They don’t remember where it came from. Somewhere on social media. Their son was found.

Corey ran out to the command post, and there was Bodin, in Scotty’s arms. He rushed to him, looking him over carefully: a scratch on his arm, a scuff on his side, a hole in his pants. And that was it.

“He acted like nothing even happened,” Sarah said. “I was like, ‘Bo where’d you go?’ and he holds up his arm and he’s all ‘My arm’ and I’m like ‘You got a scratch, Ok? But where did you go?'”

Bo is a man of few words. He’s only two after all. He will answer with a yes or no. So it’s hard to tell what really happened that night and why he was out under the full moon.

As Bodin devoured string cheese, Scotty had asked him a few questions and pieced together what had happened — Buford had found him and curled up beside him under a tree, keeping him warm through the night. It made sense. That’s exactly what Buford does with the calves.

“Buford was just doing what feels natural to him,” Dawn said.

Scotty got tired of hearing people post on social media in disbelief that a 2-year-old boy could walk seven miles, some calling the whole thing a hoax or criticizing Bodin’s parents.

“It was just annoying. People are so cruel,” Scotty said. “I just wanted to find out for myself. When I first saw him in the driveway I didn’t know if someone kidnapped him and dropped him off here or what happened. That’s a long way to go for a kid.”

It is an extraordinary situation. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2-year-olds are still learning coordination when they walk and they have a very short attention span. Most children don’t have enough motor skills to participate in sports until they are at least 6.

The search and rescue team’s algorithm would have maxed Bodin out at four miles, based on the 16 hours he was gone.

The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office determined there wasn’t any foul play.

So Scotty saddled up and followed Bodin’s tracks. Scotty’s an old hand at this: he has run out of wall space to mount the animals he’s hunted over the years.

He traced the powerline trail that runs between his ranch and the Allens’ place, a rugged dirt road used by off-road service vehicles.

Scotty found Bodin’s tracks in a wash three miles down the powerline trail, and found them again five miles away and then six miles away.

Defying the algorithm

Bodin, who appears unfazed by his adventure, may not know it but he’s changed things for his parents, for law enforcement, for Scotty and for Buford.

Sarah makes sure someone is watching Bodin when he’s outside.

Corey wants to build a coalition of people in the community to construct lighthouses to help guide kids who might be lost or stolen.

Scotty, used to keeping to himself, has been fielding calls from news outlets across the country eager to share Buford’s story. AI-generated children’s books about Buford and Bodin have started popping up, along with YouTube videos featuring songs about their adventure.

And though Buford may not know it, he’s famous now.

For the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, Bodin’s adventure is a lesson that some missing people defy the algorithm, and the search and rescue team should keep that in mind, Lanoue said.

“He defies my algorithm, too,” Corey said.

Reach Caitlin McGlade at caitlin.mcglade@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on BlueSky, @caitmcglade.bsky.social.

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