Brandon Boudreaux, the Arizona man who survived a 2019 shooting outside his home, is now telling his side of the story seven years later in a new memoir called "Unthinkable." The attack, which prosecutors say was orchestrated by Lori Vallow Daybell, exposed a murder-for-hire plot against him.
On Oct. 2, 2019, Boudreaux was pulling his Tesla into the driveway of his home in Gilbert when a gunman allegedly fired from a parked Jeep Wrangler. Boudreaux said he saw the vehicle's rear window open moments before the shooter fired. A bullet struck the driver's-side door and shattered the window, narrowly missing his head. Prosecutors said Vallow recruited her brother, Alex Cox, to kill Boudreaux, who was in the middle of a contentious divorce from Vallow's niece, Melani Pawlowski. Police identified Cox as the suspected shooter soon after the attack, but he died in December 2019 without facing charges.
Vallow's legal troubles have grown considerably since then. An Arizona jury convicted her in June 2025 of conspiring to kill Boudreaux. Two months earlier, another jury in Arizona had convicted her of conspiring to murder her estranged husband, Charles Vallow, whom Cox shot and killed in July 2019. The Arizona verdicts followed her 2023 trial in Idaho, where jurors found her guilty of murdering her two children, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua "JJ" Vallow, 7, and of conspiring to murder Tammy Daybell, the former wife of her husband, Chad Daybell. Jurors also convicted her of grand theft for collecting her children's Social Security benefits.
Boudreaux said he initially wrote the book privately for his four children, wanting them to have a fuller account of the ordeal and an understanding of his decisions. "I'm sure I made some mistakes," he told Fox News Digital. "If they need some closure, if they need to understand better... my goal was to give them all the information." He also wanted to show how his faith anchored him while giving his children the freedom to choose their own spiritual path. "I want them to understand their dad and maybe in understanding their dad and why he made the choices he did, maybe they'll understand themselves better," he said.
The project grew after Boudreaux shared the manuscript with loved ones, who encouraged him to publish it. He said he waited until the criminal proceedings had advanced before speaking publicly, to avoid releasing information that could interfere with the investigations. "I needed to go on the stand with a defense attorney," he said. "I just felt more comfortable waiting and making sure that I let that process go first."
During Vallow's Idaho murder trial, Boudreaux testified that his marriage to Pawlowski collapsed in 2019 as she grew closer to Vallow. The couple filed for divorce in July 2019 and later fought over custody of their children. A 2020 custody filing in Maricopa County Superior Court, cited by East Idaho News, claimed Pawlowski believed a "dark entity" or demon had possessed Boudreaux, and alleged that Chad Daybell told her something must happen to Boudreaux to advance his spirit and the Lord's plan. Pawlowski has not been charged in the shooting.
Boudreaux, who remarried in 2020, said the shooting, the divorce and the lingering fear that someone was still searching for him have made it hard to trust others. "Having been through someone shooting at me, and then having them continue, in my opinion, to keep looking for me... you're just naturally gonna have some trust issues," he said. He acknowledged that public attention has brought discomfort but said most people treat him with kindness and respect. He declined to discuss details of the shooting investigation, saying he preferred to leave that to law enforcement. The Gilbert Police Department confirmed to NBC News that the investigation into the 2019 shooting remains active.
Boudreaux said he hopes readers take away a broader message about finding value and overcoming adversity. "I hope that everybody has value and everybody can help someone else," he said, adding that difficult experiences do not have to dictate how a person responds. "Just because something hard happens in your life doesn't mean that you have to respond a certain way."