A 65-year-old captor, who allegedly fatally shot a school bus driver on Tuesday, and then abducted a 5-year-old boy, holding him captive in an underground bunker entered its fourth day of a hostage crisis according to reports from NPR and the Associated Press.
The kidnapping suspect, said to be a survivalist and Vietnam veteran, has been speaking to hostage negotiators, in hopes of getting out the young boy, Ethan.
The gunman, identified as Jimmy Dykes shot school bus driver Charles Albert Poland Jr. to death on Tuesday. The 66-year old reportedly attempted to shield his young passengers. After Dykes shot Polland multiple times, he abducted Ethan, who is reportedly suffering with Asperger's syndrome, and slipped him into an underground bunker on his property.
Dykes' shelter has electricity, food, TV. It's about 4-feet underground, with about 6-by-8 feet of floor space and the PVC pipe that negotiators were speaking through, said James Arrington, police chief of the neighboring town of Pinckard, as reported by the AP.
More than a dozen police cars, trucks, helicopters and officers from multiple agencies and news media camped out in a historically quiet Midland City, on Friday. According to an AP report, Dykes was known around the neighborhood as a menacing figure who neighbors said once beat a dog to death with a lead pipe, threatened to shoot children for setting foot on his property and patrolled his yard at night with a flashlight and a firearm.
The intensity of the hostage standoff has hardly abated, other than, Ethan reportedly getting his medication. Negotiators continue to speak to conduct conversations with Dykes through a pipe.
