BEAVER COUNTY, Utah — This weekend, a 3-year-old boy went missing in the West Desert in central Utah outside of Milford and was found more than 12 hours later.
The child, "Mo-Mo," went missing Friday night and was eventually found Saturday morning by a local resident who volunteered his time to help with the search.
Dillon Bell, a father to three young girls, learned about the missing toddler and decided to help.
"I've taken my kids out to that exact spot where he was lost and looked for rocks out there, you know, so it definitely... it hit close to home," Bell said Sunday in an interview with FOX 13 News.
Bell had planned to head out with his brother-in-law to look for deer on Saturday, but they changed plans after hearing about the missing 3-year-old.
"[We] just waited a little bit for daylight, got a plan together, and went out and started hiking," he said.
In coordination with Beaver County Search and Rescue, Bell and a few others went to a general area that hadn’t been searched yet. They kept pushing east, but Bell said he had a gut feeling to go the other direction.
"Finally got the point where... something's obviously telling me to go to the west, so I left my brother-in-law and father-in-law and decided to go to the west... and you know, just got unbelievably lucky," he said.
Bell called out Mo-Mo’s name and eventually started to hear a voice answer back. That faint voice then got louder.
"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 said the search and rescue team had told his party that the boy was wearing pink snow boots, so when he saw the missing boy, he knew immediately that he had found who he was looking for.
"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.”
It's a crazy moment Bell will remember for the rest of his life.
"I picked him up and just started carrying him down the hill I was on, hiking back to the truck, trying to get him warm," he recalled. "I was talking to him, he told me he was cold, he told me he was scared.”
He drove to the staging area, where paramedics took the boy away to check him out.
"Everybody on that team, everybody on that mountain was ecstatic, just so happy that he was found and found alive and in such good condition," Bell said.
Bell was able to briefly speak with Mo-Mo’s father, and the two hugged.
Bell said it was his gut instinct to go a different direction that likely saved the 3-year-old's life.
"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.
