Brandon Boudreaux Recounts Ambush and the Questions That Followed

The bullet shattered Brandon Boudreaux’s driver’s-side window and lodged in the frame of his vehicle, missing his head by inches. Then came the police questions: who might be angry with him, and what could explain someone opening fire outside his own home?

Seven years after the October 2, 2019, shooting in Gilbert, Arizona, Boudreaux is describing both the ambush and the disorienting experience of being investigated while still processing that he had survived it.

In an interview with Arizona’s Family reporter Morgan Loew, he said he understood why detectives needed to start with him. Understanding the process, however, did not make sitting at the scene feel less vulnerable.

His account comes ahead of his memoir, “Unthinkable,” scheduled for release in February 2027. The book addresses the attack, survivor’s guilt and co-parenting, according to the station.

A Shot From a Parked Vehicle

Boudreaux had pulled into his driveway when someone fired from a nearby parked vehicle. “Someone just shot my window,” he told a 911 dispatcher.

Body-camera footage captured an officer inspecting the damage and observing that it did not appear to have come from a BB gun. Investigators began trying to determine who had targeted him.

At the time, Boudreaux and his then-wife, Melani Pawlowski, were divorcing. Pawlowski is a niece of Lori Vallow Daybell, whose extended family would become the focus of multiple homicide investigations. Arizona’s Family reported that Pawlowski was investigated during the broader inquiry but was not criminally charged.

Prosecutors identified Vallow Daybell’s brother, Alex Cox, as the suspected gunman. Cox died in December 2019 before charges were filed in the shooting.

Boudreaux said the initial police questioning forced him to confront another reality of surviving an attack: investigators first had to eliminate him as someone who might have information or involvement beyond his account as the target.

“They’ve got to start with you,” he told Arizona’s Family.

As detectives worked, he said, the closeness of the bullet became harder to absorb. “It starts hitting you more and more, like, I’m lucky to be alive,” he said.

Looking Back at Earlier Police Responses

The attack came three months after the death of Charles Vallow, Boudreaux’s friend and former uncle-in-law. Cox shot and killed Vallow in Chandler in July 2019. Police initially treated that shooting as self-defense, Arizona’s Family reported.

Vallow Daybell’s daughter, Tylee Ryan, then 16, spoke to Chandler detectives after the shooting and described grabbing a baseball bat during the confrontation. Ryan was later killed in Idaho.

Boudreaux said he has watched her police interview only once because he finds it too painful. In the new interview, he questioned whether separating the children from the adults for a time could have changed the handling of events.

Those questions are his retrospective assessment, not a finding that a particular police decision caused the later killings.

Boudreaux said he does not want his focus to be solely on assigning blame to individual officers. He described accepting that he cannot change what happened while remaining interested in changes that might protect someone else.

“If there’s ways we can have a better system, I’m open to helping in any way I could so that someone else wouldn’t go through it,” he told Arizona’s Family.

References: Surviving Target of Lori Vallow Daybell Murder Plot Reflects on 2019 Ambush and Healing | Unthinkable: Brandon Boudreaux Shares His Story of Survival, Betrayal and Hope | Cult Mom Lori Vallow Wanted Him Dead. 7 Years Later, He Gets the Last Word Surviving Doomsday Killers’ Plot

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