Daryl follows a particular routine when it’s time to get to work. He gets into his gear, loosens up for a few seconds and takes a seat. Then a co-worker grabs a shoe and shoves it into Daryl’s face. Oh, by the way, Daryl is a dog.
He’s a bloodhound, specifically. So sticking his snout deep into a sneaker is standard practice when the humans he works with at the Farmington (Missouri) Correctional Center’s K-9 unit need him to track someone down. On a blazing hot day last July, at the edge of a ravine about 60 miles south of St. Louis, 6-year-old Daryl was given one of the most important jobs of his life. He had to find a 13-year-old boy named Dakota “Cody” Trenkle Jr.
The boy had been missing for more than three days, and his mom and stepdad, Stephanie and Jared Neely, were frantic with worry. Authorities believed Cody might be somewhere in that deep, wooded ravine, but time was running out for him if he didn’t have food or water. So Stephanie provided one of her son’s most pungent sneakers, and Lt. Joe Gillam, the leader of the K-9 unit, let Daryl smell it. Then he gave the command: “Find.” Daryl took off running.
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A boy like any other
Sunday, July 27, 2025, began like any other summer day for Cody—with his brothers, Steven, 12, and Parker, 7, under the watchful eye of his grandmother Martha Askins. She often watched the boys while his mom, a corrections officer at the Missouri Department of Corrections, worked a 12-hour shift. Askins lives in an unincorporated gated community called Goose Creek Lake. Whenever Cody was there, his routine was to ride his skateboard to his friend Sam’s house on the other side of the 2,500-acre development and hang out there for much of the day.
Around 9 a.m., Cody had set out across town on his faded gray board decorated with a purple graffiti monster. A few minutes later, security cameras outside the firehouse near the entrance to the community recorded the 5-foot-6, 170-pound teenager skating by, decked out in a greenish-blue Harry Potter T-shirt and a black-and-white flat-brimmed ball cap over a mop of curly black hair.
“I remember skating past the firehouse,” Cody says. He doesn’t remember what happened after that. And there’s no further security footage to help fill in the timeline.
As best as anyone can guess, he skated for another 15 minutes or so before heading down a hill on Wren Drive to a T-intersection with Bluebird Drive, which was on the edge of a ravine. It seems that Cody lost control of his skateboard, hit some tall grass on the other side of the intersection, flew off his board and tumbled down a steep incline into the ravine. Did he lose consciousness fully? Nobody knows. He certainly hit his head.
Cody apparently had periods of partial consciousness, because he stripped off some of his clothes and crawled into deeper shade to escape the July heat, ending up about 250 yards from the road. It would be about another nine hours before anyone even realized he was missing.
The day he vanished
Cody typically came home from Sam’s by about 4 in the afternoon, in plenty of time for dinner. When he didn’t, Askins began to wonder what was up. Cody didn’t have his cellphone with him, so at 6 p.m. she called Sam’s house.
“Hey, is Cody coming home any time soon?”
“He isn’t here,” Sam said. “He never made it today.”
Sam had assumed that his friend had found something else to do. When Sam and Askins realized that neither of them had seen Cody all day, Askins called the Francois County Sheriff’s Department, then Stephanie.
“You need to call me immediately,” Stephanie heard her mother say on her voicemail when she finished her shift at 7 p.m. “Cody’s not home,” Askins told her daughter when they finally connected.
“What do you mean?”
“Cody went to his friend’s house, and his friend says he never showed up, and he hasn’t called us back and we don’t know where he is.”
That’s not like Cody, Stephanie thought. Her son was a creature of habit—he followed the same schedule every day. She drove straight to her mom’s, where officers from the sheriff’s department were gathering details and filling out a report. They suspected that Cody might have run away. Stephanie knew in her bones that was not a possibility. Either somebody kidnapped him, or he’s lying dead in a ditch somewhere, she thought. So she set out to find him.
Stephanie and her mom drove up and down every street in Goose Creek Lake in Askins’s truck, while Jared searched the neighborhood on his motorcycle. But it was getting dark. There was only so much they could do.
A frantic search
Stephanie’s sister, Brittney Van Volkenburg, is a volunteer firefighter for the Goose Creek Lake Fire Department, and Monday morning—about 24 hours after Cody was last seen—Stephanie called on her to organize a search team from the firehouse.
Van Volkenburg rallied her team. “I said, ‘This is my nephew—we need to get a search team together,’ and everyone was immediately on board,” she later told the local NBC News affiliate.
The search party, made up of nearly 50 firefighters and local residents, conducted a grid search. Some went off-road in all-terrain side-by-sides. Some rode motorcycles. Some walked arm-in-arm through the woods. They looked just about everywhere they could, but didn’t realize that to find Cody, they’d have to hike deep into the wooded ravine off Bluebird and Wren.
Jared and Askins took care of the two younger boys while Stephanie and her sister led the search. As the hours—and then days—passed, Stephanie was determined not to let panic overtake her. Me sitting on my butt crying is not gonna help anything, she thought.
Meanwhile, the sheriff’s office received reports that Cody had been seen two towns over. Stephanie never bought any of that—she felt sure he was somewhere in Goose Creek Lake. He had to be.
She also understood that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “I knew the statistics,” Stephanie says. “The longer it went on, the more I had to kind of wrap my brain around that we may not be finding Cody—we may be finding a body.”
Hope on the trail
On Wednesday, July 30, a little past 9:30 in the morning, Askins jumped in her truck for another desperate pass down the same roads they’d been over countless times. Her grandson Steven sat in the back, his eyes peeled.
“Stop!” Steven suddenly yelled. There, in tall grass near the intersection of Bluebird and Wren, sat Cody’s skateboard with its distinctive purple graffiti monster. They sped back to Askins’s house to get Stephanie and Jared.
Stephanie will never forget what she saw when she arrived on the scene. “The nose of the skateboard was pointing down toward the ravine,” she says. “It was almost literally like the universe was telling us, ‘He’s right here.’ ”
Jared and Stephanie slid down into the ravine, which was slick from the previous night’s rain. The terrain was rough—large boulders, loose rocks, oak trees and thick undergrowth—and they couldn’t see Cody anywhere. Before they went any farther, they called the sheriff’s department and were instructed to wait for officers to arrive with their K-9 unit.
But St. Francois County’s dogs are German shepherds and Belgian Malinois, neither of which can track older scents the way bloodhounds do. So a call went out to Joe Gillam at the Farmington Correctional Center. He already knew about the missing local boy. He also knew that his dogs had never found anyone when the trail had gone so cold.
“Look, I’m not going to make any promises,” Gillam told the county officer on the phone. “This is like a 3-day-old track. But, with finding the skateboard, we have a place to start. So we’re gonna do everything we can to get Cody home.”
A nail-biting rescue
Gillam gathered a team—six people in all—and assessed which of his five bloodhounds would be best suited for this situation. It was clearly a job for Daryl, who worked well in hot weather and on older tracks, and was great in thick vegetation.
When they arrived a little over an hour later, Gillam and his crew took a quick look around, staying out of the ravine to avoid creating more scents for Daryl to sort through. Stephanie was waiting with Cody’s sneakers. Daryl was fitted into his harness. Ready to go to work, he sniffed one of the shoes and heard that magic word: Find!
Gillam and two members of his team stayed at the command post at the top of the ravine, with Cody’s family nearby. K-9 handler Lt. Chris Marschel and the two others from the team went with Daryl. Within minutes, Daryl found his way to the edge of the ravine and repeatedly stuck his neck out, an indicator that he had picked up a scent he liked. After that, he was off, down the steep 15-foot drop, the K-9 unit members literally sliding down behind him.
Gillam and the others lost sight of the rescuers as soon as they entered the thick vegetation. But information came in over the radio. After several minutes, Daryl found Cody’s Harry Potter T-shirt and black pants. On they went, deeper into the wet woods. Then, 21 minutes after Daryl had set off, the radio crackled. “Hey, we’ve got a visual!”
Nobody knew yet if it was a rescue or a recovery. Stephanie turned to her sister and the other rescue workers at the command post and said: “Go! Go get him!” The firefighters and EMTs, including Brittney, tore off down the ravine, heading for the GPS coordinates that Daryl’s handlers had sent to them.
After an agonizing few minutes, Stephanie heard her sister’s voice over the radio: “We found him! We found him!” The tone in Van Volkenburg’s voice told Stephanie that Cody was alive. He was lying face up in a temporary creek created by the rain, which had helped prevent his body from overheating. But he was severely dehydrated. One of the K-9 unit members, Lt. Virginia Stafford, slowly poured water, a few drops at a time, into Cody’s mouth. He was looking at his rescuers, alert but unable to speak.
The road to recovery
Cody’s injuries were extensive: lacerations and scrapes all over his body from falling and rolling down the ravine, and bedsore-like burns on his back from lying in one position too long. The medical team would later discover that he had suffered a fracture on the right side of his head, brain trauma, pneumonia and bacterial infections. It was no wonder that Cody hadn’t called out for help or been able to extricate himself from the ravine. But his survival instincts had kicked in enough that he had crawled to a shaded area until help finally arrived.
The doctors later told Stephanie that Cody probably wouldn’t have survived more than another few hours alone in the woods. The fire department’s rescue team secured Cody to a stretcher and carried him out of the ravine, then drove him to a nearby flight pad, where he was airlifted by medical transport helicopter to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis. Once in the pediatric ICU, Cody started crashing. The doctors decided the best thing for his survival odds would be to place him in a medically induced coma.
For days, Stephanie and the rest of the family waited at Cody’s bedside. The doctors tried to ween him off his sedation and wake him, but his body wasn’t ready. Finally, after 11 days, he came out of his coma. Using a hand gesture from American Sign Language that Stephanie had taught her sons, he told his mom, “I love you.”
When Cody could talk again, two weeks after he was found, he made the sort of proclamation you’d expect from a 13-year-old boy: “Ma, I need a Coke from McDonald’s.” After a couple of weeks in a rehab facility, Cody returned to his home in Farmington in late August. A few weeks later, he started eighth grade at Farmington Middle School.
Cody’s recovery has been slow. “He still has a lot of neuro challenges,” Stephanie said about three months after the incident. “He’ll be having a conversation with you and then completely forget what he’s talking about. Or he’ll be standing there and he’ll lose all muscle control.” The doctors had explained that full recovery would take another 6 to 12 months.
An emotional reunion
On Thursday, Sept. 11, Cody, by then 14, traveled to the Farmington Correctional Center to thank the four-legged hero who led rescuers to where he lay in the ravine. “Hi, buddy,” Cody said to Daryl in a soft, loving tone, as he bent down to pet the black-and-brown bloodhound and affectionately scratch his neck and chin.
“I was getting a little emotional myself because I have a 14-year-old,” Gillam recalls. “Seeing him get to meet the dog that saved him, that was pretty special.”
As the media picked up on Cody’s story, folks from as far away as California sent Daryl dog treats. As for Cody, he says he has a new four-word mantra for when he is finally allowed to get back on his skateboard: “Keep the helmet on!”
“And,” adds his mom, “don’t leave home without your phone.”
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