An Alabama Town Confronts a Kidnapping
Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated Press
Law enforcement officers on
Thursday stationed themselves around a property in Midland City, Ala.,
where a man held a young boy hostage in a bunker.
By ROBBIE BROWN and KIM SEVERSON
Published: January 31, 2013
MIDLAND CITY, Ala. — Many things hold little Southern towns together.
There is a common love of the region, the peace that comes with a rural
life and, often, prayer.
In this town of 2,300 in the heart of peanut country, people drew on all
of those as they endured what by Thursday night had stretched into an
unimaginable situation.
A relative newcomer to town — a man who had fought in Vietnam and
appeared to harbor a deep distrust of government and a grudge against
every neighbor — shot and killed a bus driver, grabbed a 5-year-old boy
named Ethan and then disappeared with the boy into a well-equipped
bunker he had spent several months digging in his yard.
By all accounts, the man neighbors and a sheriff’s office official
identified as Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, had no connection to the boy.
“As far as we know, there is no relation at all,” said Michael Senn, a
pastor at the Midway Assembly of God Church, who had comforted some of
the children who escaped from the bus and ran to his church. “He just
wanted a child for a hostage situation.” Like so many clerics in this
Bible-reading community, Mr. Senn has been leading prayer services as
the hours have stretched into days.
By late Thursday, no end was in sight. The F.B.I. stayed in contact with
Mr. Dykes by day and let him sleep at night, said Police Chief James
Arrington of Pinckard, a nearby city.
“They’re taking time and trying to wear him out,” he said. “He may do
harm if they try to rush him. We don’t know how much ammunition or bombs
he has.”
Mr. Dykes, neighbors said, has been known to stay in his bunker for up
to eight days. Some said they watched him build it, carrying cinder
blocks and digging for hours.
No one is sure exactly why he took the boy. “He don’t care too much for
the government,” Chief Arrington said. “That’s all we know.”
The boy, whom his mother calls “love bug,” is reportedly doing well in
the bunker, said an Alabama state senator, Harri Anne Smith, in a
television interview early Thursday. She and state Representative Steve
Clouse have met with Ethan’s mother, and said food and medication her
son needed for autism was delivered to the bunker through a 60-foot
plastic pipe that was about four inches in diameter.
Still, Mr. Clouse said, the family is “just holding on by a thread.”
As it became clear that the standoff would continue — the bunker was
well supplied with food and, apparently, a television and lights — the
national news media began arriving.
Through Wednesday and into Thursday, residents watched as their tiny
town, where the National Peanut Festival in nearby Dothan is usually the
biggest event of the year, became a near-constant presence on national
television.
The killing of the bus driver and the resulting standoff soon became one
more point of discussion in the national debate about guns. Most people
here own guns and hunt. And many are steadfast in their belief that
guns are not the problem, mental health is.
Around town and along the entrance to the dirt road where the bunker was
sunk into Mr. Dykes’s land, people began arguing in favor of allowing
bus drivers to carry guns.
“I follow the old Boy Scout’s motto, ‘Be prepared,’ ” said James
Alexander, 72, who said he sleeps with a gun by his pillow. “I cannot
foresee a way to prevent this without shooting the guy.”
Although reporters were held across the highway from a red dirt road
that leads into the little neighborhood of about 13 houses, and there
were no major developments to report on Thursday, on television the
story was regularly spliced between coverage of state and national
hearings on gun violence and mental health prompted by the shootings in
Newtown, Conn., in December.
“It’s crazy,” said Tyler Cobb, a high school junior who was one of more
than 90 students who met to pray for Ethan on Wednesday. “It happened in
Connecticut. But it really hits home when it happens here. Our little
town on CNN. It’s just weird.”
Prayer vigils sprung up like farm stands in the summer here. Five were
held Wednesday, and on Thursday members of a church youth group gathered
to pray across the highway from the road that leads to bunker.
Prayer took hold on social media sites, too. A Twitter call to pray for Ethan gained steam.
The bus driver, Charles Albert Poland Jr., 66, encountered Mr. Dykes as
he drove children home from school on Tuesday. The bus stopped and Mr.
Dykes jumped on, according to police reports based on interviews with
children on the bus, and then he demanded two boys between the ages of 6
and 8.
Mr. Poland held Mr. Dykes at the front of the bus while children escaped
out the back. He was hit with as many as four bullets from a
9-millimeter pistol. The well-liked driver was quickly called a hero by
residents.
With the driver down, Mr. Dykes grabbed two children, the police said.
One escaped. Ethan may have frozen or fainted, allowing Mr. Dykes to
take him swiftly from the bus.
Tim Byrd, chief investigator with the Dale County Sheriff’s Office, told
the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog that Mr. Dykes was a
Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress who “did not trust the
government.”
He was also scheduled to face charges of menacing in court on Wednesday
after neighbors asserted that he shot a gun at them in a dispute over
someone driving on his property.
Meanwhile, the community here did what small communities do. It did not
take long for churchgoers to start cooking, joining the Salvation Army
and the Red Cross in efforts to feed more than 50 F.B.I. negotiators and
law enforcement officers from at least eight agencies.
“Everybody wants to help, everybody is talking about the boy,” said Lisa
Boatwright, a secretary at a nearby church. “But there’s only one thing
we can do: pray this ends safely.”
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