Gunman Shoots Bus Driver, Abducts Child, Hides In Bunker. (1 Viewer)

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ramblar

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Tue Jan 29, 2013 10:23pm EST
(Reuters) - A gunman boarded an Alabama school bus and shot the driver several times on Tuesday, then fled with a 6-year-old child passenger and holed up in an underground bunker, Alabama media reported.
Officials at the Dale County Sheriff's Department could not be immediately reached for comment on the incident in Midland City, but they put out a brief statement saying a command post had been set up near the site where the suspected shooter was barricaded.
The Dothan Eagle newspaper said the gunman was in a bunker near his home hours after the shooting, but that it was not clear if the child taken from the bus was also in the bunker.
The shooting comes as the nation is on edge about gun violence, especially in schools, after a gunman shot dead 20 students and six staff members at a Connecticut elementary school last month, stoking a national debate on gun control.
The sheriff's department said multiple agencies were assisting with the incident and local area schools would be closed on Wednesday. It gave no further details.
 

ramblar

Forum Veteran
From Examiner.com

It's every parent's worst nightmare; their child has been kidnapped. The incident happened around 4 p.m. today in Dale County, Alabama. It's reported the Dale County Sheriff’s Department has established their command post at the intersection of 231 North and Private Road 1539.
A witness, Michael Creel was interviewed by WTVY said the bus driver was shot three times. It's reported that the bus driver died from his wounds.
Creel says the child the gunman kidnapped fainted and was grabbed up and carried off by the gunman. Creel also said the gunman was his neighbor Jimmy Lee Dykes who lived about 100-yards from him. Local law-enforcement officials have not identified the suspect.
Dykes, a 67-year-old Vietnam veteran boarded a school bus and demanded two children ages six and eight be released to him. It's said the bus driver refused and tried to take off in the bus and that's when Dykes shot the driver.
Dykes then grabbed the six-year old child and left. The attack is said to have happened in front of the Destiny Church on Highway 231 near Midland City. It is reported that Dykes is holding the six-year old hostage in an underground bunker near the Destiny Church on Highway 231.
The Dothan Eagle reports the following,
James Edward Davis, Jr., who lives near Dykes on Private Road 1539, said Dykes pulled a gun on him and his daughter on Dec. 10 after Dykes believed Davis had driven in Dykes' yard. Davis said he reported Dykes to the Dale County Sheriff's Department. Dykes was arrested Dec. 22 and charged with menacing.​
There are reports that Dykes built the bunker in his backyard made from particle board, plywood and two-by-fours. This is where he's supposedly holding he six-year old child hostage. Davis was reported to have seen Dykes digging dirt at 2:30 in the morning, in his backyard.
This is a tragedy beyond comprehension, and the Dothan Christianity Examiner is asking all who read this to stand in agreement with him in the following prayer.
Father God we come to you in the mighty and merciful name of Jesus and ask that you would be in this situation. We pray that you would bring comfort to the family of the bus driver, and that you would cause the man holding the child as a hostage to be overtaken with guilt and consumed with the wrong he has done.
We ask you to keep the child safe and ask that this gunman will surrender to the police. If he does not we pray that you would keep the child safe, and that you help the police take this person down if necessary. We thank you father for bringing a peaceful resolution to this.
Lord we beg you, we beseech you for mercy father; this is just a child, and they deserve to be returned to their parents safe and sound. We thank you father for hearing our cries, and we stand in agreement with those who are praying.
 

Wolf

The weak are meat the strong do eat...
Really makes you wonder what set this guy off. Hope the child makes it through this ok.
 

ramblar

Forum Veteran
UPDATE:




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.


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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 on Tuesday, 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 that 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 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, an Alabama state senator, Harri Anne Smith, said 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. Many people here own guns and hunt and 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 Scouts 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 a wooded area with about a dozen 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.
 
I

Ivan Drago

Internet Warrior
Every story like this one will be used either for or against guns, I wouldn't be surprised if people start saying it's a set up and it staged to show guns are bad or that if the bus driver had of been armed the child would be at home with his family right about now.
 

ramblar

Forum Veteran
Every story like this one will be used either for or against guns, I wouldn't be surprised if people start saying it's a set up and it staged to show guns are bad or that if the bus driver had of been armed the child would be at home with his family right about now.
Your right, and the home schooling lobbiests will use it to prove that they have the right idea. This story will be spun more than socks in a heavy duty washer.
 

ramblar

Forum Veteran
Your right, and the home schooling lobbiests will use it to prove that they have the right idea. This story will be spun more than socks in a heavy duty washer.
On a side note, after years of watching bus drivers flip out, because of shit head kids, if I knew my bus driver was packing heat, I would WALK to school!
 

Wolf

The weak are meat the strong do eat...
Well the abductor is reportedly dead and the child is safe. Best possible outcome as any considering the situation.
 

Geemonster

What an arsehole
Short Bussed
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Tue Jan 29, 2013 10:23pm EST
(Reuters) - A gunman boarded an Alabama school bus and shot the driver several times on Tuesday, then fled with a 6-year-old child passenger and holed up in an underground bunker, Alabama media reported.
Officials at the Dale County Sheriff's Department could not be immediately reached for comment on the incident in Midland City, but they put out a brief statement saying a command post had been set up near the site where the suspected shooter was barricaded.
The Dothan Eagle newspaper said the gunman was in a bunker near his home hours after the shooting, but that it was not clear if the child taken from the bus was also in the bunker.
The shooting comes as the nation is on edge about gun violence, especially in schools, after a gunman shot dead 20 students and six staff members at a Connecticut elementary school last month, stoking a national debate on gun control.
The sheriff's department said multiple agencies were assisting with the incident and local area schools would be closed on Wednesday. It gave no further details.

When will you Americans get in line and admit that right to bear arms is like 2 centuries old and times change.
 
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