A Missouri man has been sentenced to four years in prison for abandoning the corpse of a 13-year-old neighbor, while now facing additional second-degree murder charges in Kansas. Damon Leonard, 47, of Pleasanton, Missouri, admitted to moving the body of Airen Andula across state lines after the boy was fatally mauled by a dog.
The incident began on December 21, 2025, when Andula went missing after riding his bicycle to feed a neighbor’s pets. The neighbor’s home sat adjacent to Leonard’s property, where local residents noted that aggressive dogs frequently roamed without restraint. Following the teenager’s disappearance, community members and law enforcement launched a massive two-day search.
During this time, Andula’s family approached Leonard directly to ask if he had seen the boy. Leonard told them he saw the teenager earlier that day but did not see him return.
On December 23, 2025, the second day of the search, Leonard called investigators and confessed that he had found the boy’s body after a fatal dog attack. Authorities state that Leonard admitted to transporting the body into Kansas, where he concealed it in a creek bed before returning to his residence.
He provided police with the exact location of the remains. Charles “Jody” Andula, the boy’s father, later stated that his son was discovered “in a brush pile, covered up,” describing the concealment as treating the child like “trash.”
Leonard was arrested the day of his phone call to police and pleaded guilty in Missouri to a charge of abandonment of a corpse on May 22. He received a four-year prison sentence for that charge.
The legal proceedings have since expanded into Kansas. The Kansas Attorney General’s Office filed a new set of charges against Leonard just prior to his Missouri sentencing. These charges include second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, criminal desecration, interference with law enforcement, and maintaining a vicious dog at large.
If convicted of the second-degree murder charge in Kansas, Leonard faces an additional 15 to 16.5 years in prison, alongside a potential four to four-and-a-half years for the involuntary manslaughter charge. It remains unclear if Leonard has secured legal representation or entered pleas for the Kansas charges.
The victim’s family has expressed profound distress over Leonard’s actions during the initial search. “I still could have overlooked, you know, the dog attack,” Charles Andula said. “That’s just a freak accident, but I can’t forgive him for what he did trying to hide my kid from us when we were all looking for him.” He added that he could not accept Leonard “playing along like he didn’t know where he was at when he did know.”
Anita Gunn, the boy’s mother, described the period following her son’s disappearance as “a big nightmare,” adding, “It’s unbelievable and we’re still not wanting to believe it’s real, but we know it is.”
READ: Florida Man Accused Of Wrapping Mother’s Body In Rug, Dumping It In River To Spend Her Money
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