Jake Stoner dreamed of someday passing his Nebraska ranch to his children and sharing the life he's worked hard to build.
His entire life, Stoner had two goals: living off the land and raising a family.
Now, one of those dreams has been cut short as he plans the funeral for his 11-month-old son, Basil, who was allegedly killed by his mother, Madeline Daly, two days before Christmas in New Mexico.
He’s always wanted to be a father, Stoner told Cowboy State Daily as he makes plans to bury Basil on his family land. Basil’s body was returned to him in early January.
It’s a small consolation to finally have him home, but it’s all he has left, Stoner said by phone from his home in Kilgore, Nebraska.
“I will never be able to comprehend the shock of this happening to my beautiful little boy,” Stoner said. “Basil was such a happy boy and full of life.”
He’ll never forget the first time he held him, or his last visit with his son in Wyoming in September when the two spent time together in a park.
“I hope that he knows how much I loved him and how badly I wanted to be his dad,” Stoner said.
On The Run
It’s been a harrowing last four months for Stoner, who reported Basil missing on Nov. 16 after Daly absconded with him after missing a court hearing regarding Stoner’s visitation rights.
Daly, who had been living in a Ten Sleep RV park at the time, disappeared with the boy after Stoner was granted temporary emergency custody following the missed court hearing in October.
A felony warrant was issued for Daly’s arrest as law enforcement and a private investigator hired by Stoner attempted to track her down.
She remained on the run for just over five weeks until a tipster tracked her to a RV park near Silver City, New Mexico.
When confronted by law enforcement, Daly reportedly took off running and hid in a nearby RV belonging to another resident.
As sheriff’s deputies attempted to negotiate a surrender, Daly reportedly shot her son and killed him.
She later told detectives that she doesn’t know why she allegedly killed her son but that she couldn’t let her ex and his family have access to him, according to court documents.
Daly further made unsubstantiated claims of abuse of the boy by Stoner and said he didn’t want anything to do “financially, emotionally or physically with their son,” though repeated legal efforts by Stoner to see his son would seemingly counter those accusations.
Daly remains in the Grant County Detention Center in New Mexico after being denied release last week pending future court hearings.
She’s charged with felony first-degree murder and abandonment of a child resulting in death and has since pleaded not guilty to all charges.
She also under federal investigation and faces a felony custody interference charge in Wyoming.
Efforts by Cowboy State Daily to reach Daly through Grant County Detention Center staff were unsuccessful.
Daly’s attorney, Tyler McCormick, likewise did not return a request for comment by publication time.
Overlooking A Meadow
Stoner declined to comment on Daly’s criminal case on the advice of his attorney.
Instead, he’s focused on planning Basil’s funeral scheduled for Feb. 7 in Nebraska and completing the necessary paperwork and other steps to create a family cemetery on his ranch property.
It is not a hard process, he said, but there are several regulatory steps with mandatory waiting periods, so it doesn’t happen overnight.
It’s bittersweet, he said, though he’s relieved to finally have his son home.
“The whole time since Basil went missing, all I could think about was bringing him home,” he said. “I just never could have imagined that it would be this way.”
Stoner and his family have picked a spot for his grave on a hill overlooking a meadow that offers a beautiful view of the valley near a windmill where his cattle graze.
“I hope he approves of the spot, as the rest of the family will join him one day,” Stoner said.
He’ll be close to his father’s house where all of his family members will also be able to stop by and visit his grave often.
Stoner said he's celebrating the small victories.
In recent weeks he was legally able to amend Basil’s birth certificate to include Stoner’s last name. Upon Basil’s birth in Wyoming, Daly had reportedly insisted that Basil take her surname.
A Father’s Mission
As Stoner continues to process his grief, he and his attorney, Christopher King of Apex Legal in Worland, Wyoming, have launched a GoFundMe to cover any necessary legal fees as they lobby to loosen the strict thresholds by which Amber Alerts are issued.
Stoner and King believe that if the national alert had been issued, Basil’s life might have been saved given the increased attention on the part of both law enforcement and the public to stop Daly as she traveled south to New Mexico.
The problem, however, is that there’s a strict threshold designed to intentionally keep the alerts from being overused out of fear of the public becoming desensitized to their urgency, according to the U.S. Department of Justice who oversees the national program.
The Amber Alert System — which stands for America’s Missing Broadcast Emergency Response — was a joint effort initiated in 1996 by Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasters and the Dallas-Fort Worth police in the wake of the kidnapping and subsequent brutal murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman.
Later, with the passage of the federal Protect Act in 2003, an alert coordinator was designated within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) who set four guidelines for issuing AMBER Alerts that states can voluntarily choose to adopt.
The guidelines state that the child must be 17 years old or younger, and law enforcement must believe an abduction has occurred.
Furthermore, there must be enough information about the child, suspect or suspect’s vehicle to help identify them, which is then entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC).
Finally, there must be enough reason to believe the child is in imminent danger of seriously bodily injury or death.
The Wyoming Legislature enacted its Amber Alert plan in January 2004, which mirrors the federal guidelines.
The program was originally under the auspices of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation but was taken over in 2016 by the Wyoming Highway Patrol who has an Amber Alert coordinator and team.
For Stoner and King, the problem rests with the strict threshold required by law enforcement to deem a child is under imminent danger or bodily injury and death.
In Basil’s case, for example, there was no information indicating that Basil was in immediate danger, according to a statement issued by Washakie County Sheriff Austin Brookwell when the boy went missing.
Brookwell, who was not available to clarify, further said in that statement that an Amber Alert was not applicable at that time.
Instead, a BOLO (be on the lookout) was issued for Daly as well as a felony warrant for her arrest that was extraditable nationally.
Red Flags
There were red flags in Daly’s past, however, that Stoner feels should have been taken into account when Basil was reported missing that made the situation much more vulnerable for the boy.
Among these include an alleged armed standoff with police in Nebraska when the couple was still together in which Daly threatened to take her own life, according to King’s narrative on the GoFundMe post.
Daly also exhibited a history of attempting to keep Stoner away from their son, King said, beginning with the couple’s breakup in July 2024 when Daly was newly pregnant.
Back then, she allegedly went on the run, King stated, randomly sending Stoner text messages telling him he would never be part of Basil’s life. However, when Daly settled into an RV park in Ten Sleep, Wyoming, to give birth to Basil in January 2025, she allowed Stoner to be present.
After his birth, Daly refused to allow Stoner to see their son, King said. Stoner then took Daly to court for visitation rights with a Washakie County District Judge appointing him what amounted to shared custody, with Stoner agreeing to drive to Wyoming for visits with his son.
Stoner was granted a handful of visits before Daly again allegedly prevented him from seeing Basil at which point Stoner once again took her back to court in October.
When Daly failed to appear for that hearing, Stoner was granted immediate custody which is when Daly fled.
Stoner told Cowboy State Daily in an earlier interview that he delighted in these visits and relished the opportunity to finally begin getting to know his son.
Following the boy’s death, Daly alludes to her desire to keep Stoner and his family away from their son as part of her reasoning for her alleged actions, court documents state.
Stoner had a sinking feeling when he learned police were closing in on Daly, telling his attorney and New Mexico authorities that he feared it would not end well given Daly’s pattern of behavior.
McCormick did not respond to comment about King’s claims about his client.
Loosening The Threshold
As it stands, law enforcement has to meet a strict threshold of what constitutes immediate danger to a child in a given situation, which is what King and Stoner would like to see better defined and loosened when it comes to issuing Amber Alerts.
The first step in this process was recently spearheaded by Brayden Harvey, a member of the Hot Springs Republican Party, who drafted “The Basil Stoner Resolution” that passed unanimously by his party on Jan. 19.
The resolution asks to loosen some of the “narrowly defined circumstances” and “rigid criteria” in determining whether a child is in immediate danger.
Specifically, the resolution asks that the alert criteria be amended to allow law enforcement to activate an alert for any missing child reasonably believed to be in danger, including those children taken by custodial and non-custodial parents, runaways where risk factors are present as well as children missing without immediate confirmed evidence of an abduction.
In particular, Harvey thinks children abducted by parents — custodial or not — need to be taken seriously.
“It seems like they think that it’s less of a danger if it’s a parent, even if they are non-custodial,” he said. “It seems to be a weak spot.”
However, WHP has issued Amber Alerts in the past for non-custodial parent abductions, including for two small children taken by their non-custodial mother in April 2022. The children were safely recovered the following day in Texas.
The resolution further states that the rigid criteria currently in place have delayed or prevented alerts for children who were in real and immediate need, but who technically did not meet the activation requirements.
“Protecting children is a fundamental responsibility of government, law enforcement, and the community, and public alert systems must err on the side of action when a child’s life may be at risk,” the resolution reads.
It also notes that other states have begun reviewing and modernizing their Amber Alert systems to allow for “greater discretion, broader eligibility, and faster deployment when danger is reasonably suspected,” but doesn’t include specific states or examples of those states' changes.
In essence, the resolution asks that a child’s safety take precedence over “rigid checklists” to maximize all the tools at law enforcement’s disposal in the critical early hours of a child going missing.
The idea is not to overuse the alert as to diminish its efficacy, Harvey said, but to use it decisively in situations in which there’s credible threat to a child’s safety and define that threshold as such.
Amber Alerts Work
There’s little doubt that Amber Alerts help save abducted children, which the resolution acknowledges.
In 2025, the Amber Alert system aided in saving 1,292 children with 241 of those rescues directly attributed to the wireless emergency alerts, according to data from the DOJ.
It’s not clear how many Amber Alerts were issued by WHP in 2025 or how the agency defines “immediate danger.” Aaron Brown, senior public relations specialist for the agency, did not respond to multiple requests for information.
However, data from the U.S. Department of Justice shows Wyoming, along with 18 other states or jurisdictions, did not issue any Amber Alerts in 2024 out of the 189 alerts issued nationally. In 2023, Wyoming was once again among the 17 other states or jurisdictions to not activate any alerts out of a total 185 issued nationally.
For both of those years, Texas came in first place for the most Amber Alerts with 54 and 49, respectively.
In 2022, however, Wyoming issued three Amber Alerts, according to the same data, and an additional one the year prior.
Harvey would like to see more alerts activated with greater latitude when it comes to prioritizing children’s safety, he said, which is why he brought the resolution forward.
Grassroots Effort
Harvey said he was touched by Stoner’s story after reading King’s narrative in the GoFundMe post. As a father of five, it hit a chord with him, he said. He’d like to see the state give children every afforded protection when it comes to protecting them and keeping them safe.
It’s also personal. When one of Harvey’s daughters was young, she used to wander off in public places, he said. It got to the point where he showed her the posters of missing children hanging in Walmart as a warning.
“It’s just one of those things I can’t even imagine,” Harvey said.
Now that the resolution has passed his party, Harvey has sent copies to all Wyoming legislators, Gov. Mark Gordon, the state’s Congressional delegation as well as state and local law enforcement agencies with the hope of seeing it grow momentum and put pressure on the legislators to “make a difference.”
He sees it as a first, grassroots step in declaring it a priority among policy makers.
He said he doesn’t like to put forth a resolution only for the sake of identifying a problem but instead wants to include a solution and path forward as well as funding for any necessary legal fees raised by the fundraiser.
Stoner, who is very much living in the aftermath of the tragedy, said he appreciates all of the efforts to amend the restrictions governing Amber Alerts because doesn’t want to see any other parents have to lose a child.
“We’re here now, and there’s nothing I can do about it except try to use this tragedy to do something good,” Stoner said.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
