A 3-year-old boy who went missing in the West desert in central Utah for more than 12 hours in below freezing temperatures is found safe.
The young boy was found and rescued by Dillon Bell, a father of 3. He had frequented the place where the boy was said to have gone missing and had come to the exact spot with his daughters earlier, looking for rocks.
On hearing about the missing boy Dillon Bell cancelled his plan to hunt deer with his brother in-law and joined the search and rescue effort led by the Beaver County Search and Rescue.
While the rest of the team were pushing eastward from a general area that had not been searched yet. Bell had a gut feeling that the boy would be found in the west direction.
So he left the team and moved towards the opposite direction all by himself. As he climbed the hill, he began to call out the boy’s name and eventually started to hear a small, faint voice respond to his calls. The voice grew clearer and louder as he moved forward.
It was one of the craziest feelings,” Bell said. “It was something I will never forget for the rest of my life, just the craziest emotions you could think of.”
He immediately recognized the boy’s pink snow boots and knew that he has found him. “As soon as I saw him… When I came around the corner and saw pink snow boots, you know, I just ran up there and picked him up,” Bell said. “It was a crazy, crazy moment.”
With the boy in his arms, Bell descended from the hill, back to his truck and got the boy warm and comforted him as he was visibly cold and scared. He drove back to the staging area and paramedics attended to Mo-Mo.
Bell said that it was a crazy moment which he would remember for the rest of his life. The search and rescue team and everybody else on the mountain, looking for the missing boy was ecstatic and beyond happy and grateful to have found ‘Mo-Mo’ alive and in good shape.
Bell and Mo-Mo’s dad met later and briefly spoke to each other and hugged. His gut instinct had most defintiely saved the boy.
“It was really an amazing thing to see all the good people in this world doing anything they can to just help a family they have never met before,” he said.