A poster of slain bus driver Charles “Chuck” Poland hangs on tree outside the City Hall in Midland City, Ala.MIDLAND CITY, Ala. – Authorities stormed an underground bunker Monday in Alabama, freeing a 5-year-old boy who had been held hostage for nearly a week in the tiny backyard shelter and leaving the boy’s abductor dead.
After days of fruitless negotiations, talks had deteriorated with an increasingly agitated Jimmy Lee Dykes, who had kidnapped the child from a school bus after fatally shooting the driver.
Dykes had been seen with a gun, and officers concluded the boy was in imminent danger, said Steve Richardson of the FBI’s office in Mobile.
Officials refused to say how the 65-year-old died.
“Ever since this started, there’s never been a moment that [the boy] wasn’t on my mind,” said Michael Senn, pastor of a church near where reporters had been camped out since the standoff began. “So when I heard that he was OK, it was just like a thousand pounds lifted off of me.”