Sallow
The Big Bad Wolf.
After murdering the Bus Driver.
Alabama child hostage situation in third day with shooting suspect, boy holed up in bunker - CBS NewsA standoff in rural Alabama went into a third day as police surrounded an underground bunker where authorities said a retired truck driver was holding a 5-year-old hostage he grabbed off a school bus after shooting the driver dead.
A normally quiet dirt road was teeming with activity Thursday around the siege that began late Tuesday. More than a dozen police cars and trucks, a fire truck, a helicopter, officers from multiple agencies, media and at least one ambulance crowded the stretch where the dead-end residential road branches off a U.S. highway near Midland City, population 2,300. A staging area for law enforcement was lit by bright lights overnight.
People who live in the neighborhood said the suspect is a retired truck driver with a reputation, CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reports. They said he allegedly beat a dog to death and threatened to shoot kids who trespass on his property. He was reportedly due in court this week on a weapons charge.
Neighbor Ronda Wilbur described the suspect to CBS News as "very anti-social, very anti-government" and that he "hates everybody."
"My granddaughter who just turned 7, when I have her visiting me this next weekend, I won't have to worry about 'mean man,'" Wilbur told CBS News. "One way or another he's not gonna be there. He will either be locked up, or he'll be dead."
Wilbur told The Associated Press that the suspect beat her 120-pound dog with a lead pipe for coming onto his side of the dirt road. The dog died a week later.
"He said his only regret was he didn't beat him to death all the way," Wilbur told the AP. "If a man can kill a dog, and beat it with a lead pipe and brag about it, it's nothing until it's going to be people."
The boy being held was watching TV and getting medication sent from home, according to state Rep. Steve Clouse, who met with authorities and visited the boy's family. Clouse said the bunker had food and electricity.
Authorities lowered medicine into the bunker for the boy after his captor agreed to it, Clouse said.
The gunman, identified by neighbors as Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, was known around the neighborhood as a menacing figure who patrolled his yard at night with a flashlight and a shotgun.
Authorities say the gunman boarded a stopped school bus Tuesday afternoon and demanded two boys between 6 and 8 years old. When the driver tried to block his way, the gunman shot him several times and took a 5-year-old boy off the bus.
Dykes had been scheduled to appear in court Wednesday to face a charge of menacing some neighbors with a gun as they drove by his house weeks ago.