Utah Teen Missing For 5 Days Found Alive In Man’s Basement, Naked And Covered In Coal

Family and friends of Madelyn Allen had been frantically searching for the 19-year-old after she disappeared on December 13, having arranged to get picked up by a man she met on the messaging app Kik, police documents show.

On Saturday night she was discovered in the man’s basement, almost 90 miles from her home, naked and covered in coal.

The suspect, 39-year-old Brent Brown, told police it was part of a consensual kidnapping role play. He was arrested and faces multiple felony charges, including obstruction of justice and aggravated kidnapping, the Gephardt Daily reported. He is also being held without bail on suspicion of rape and object rape; he has yet to be formally charged.

Security footage from Snow College shows the student leaving her dorm on the night of the 13th at 9:20 PM; her roommates raised the alarm when she failed to turn up the following morning.

That same morning, her parents received an alarming text message from her phone that simply read: “I love you.”

According to police, Brown had allowed her to send that single text before taking her phone from her.

A probable cause affidavit claims the man tied up the teen while he was at work, took her wallet and threw her phone away when he discovered police were searching for her, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

He also “threatened her, saying if she left or told anyone about him, he would come after her family and sister,” it said.

Investigators were able to track the location of the text to the town of Loa, 87 miles from her college; while searching the town (population 500), they approached a house on Main St. and spotted a person with light-colored hair and slight build peeking out of a basement window, the affidavit claims.

As they knocked on the door, the person “ran out of sight.” A man answered but told officers he was alone, and refused a search of the house. But they returned with a warrant, having obtained permission to search the house from the homeowners — Brown’s parents.

Inside they said they found a Snow College ID belonging to Madelyn Allen. They then found the teen hidden in a coal storage area in the basement. She was naked and completely covered in coal in an effort to conceal her, the affidavit said.

Elsewhere in the house police say they found a gun in an open suitcase with clothes that appeared to belong to Allen; they also found three knives.

She told police “Brown raped her several times daily,” and that “she did not want to have sex with Brown,” but she didn’t want to leave because he knew her address and had threatened to harm her family, the affidavit states.

She said she was sitting next to him at one point when a report about her disappearance came on the news; she said he told her he had mailed her phone to the Arizona/Mexico border “so nobody could locate her”, and later told her police had given up looking for her, it states, per KSL.

“We got the phone call and [the police chief] said, ‘I have her.’ We dropped to our knees,” her father Jonathan Allen said at a news conference. “We were so grateful, elated. We couldn’t describe the feelings that we had as we embraced each other.”

“The ordeal that she has been through is dangerous and traumatic, the details of which we have only begun to understand,” her uncle Jacob Allen added. “She is a fighter. She is now a survivor. We are grateful she is with us again so she can now recover.”

Also speaking at the conference, Snow College President Bradley Cook said: “It reminds us of some dangers, especially our young people who are online. You need to be careful. … We just have to be ever vigilant about those kinds of interactions.”