Salon.com > Jay Reeves

Donors give thousands to Alabama bunker child hostage

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:34:00 +0000

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Donors have given thousands of dollars and scores of Teddy bears and toy cars to the Alabama boy held hostage for days in an underground bunker until FBI agents shot and killed the captor in a dramatic rescue.

Some of the money raised during a brief online campaign is going to give the child and his rural family a dream trip to Disney World, organizers say.

But thousands more in contributions are being placed into accounts overseen by a lawyer in cooperation with a guardian, both of whom were appointed by a state judge to help care for the boy, Ethan Gilman of Midland City.

Dale County Probate Judge Sharon Michalic said the child's mother approved the arrangement, which Michalic described as typical for cases in which an underage child and money are involved.

"We want to make sure his interests are protected," Michalic said.

Ethan, 6, is back home with his mother, Jennifer Kirkland, after being rescued from the subterranean shelter where he was held by Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65. The child's father is dead.

Authorities said Dykes shot and killed the boy's school bus driver and dragged the child into the rural bunker, where he was held until agents stormed the small structure on Feb. 4, killing Dykes.

Alabama child hostage released, a small town exhales

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:40:00 +0000

MIDLAND CITY, Ala. (AP) — A 5-year-old boy was back with his ecstatic family and playing with his toy dinosaur after his nearly weeklong ordeal as a hostage in an underground bunker was ended by a sudden police raid and the death of his kidnapper.

The FBI and other law enforcement officials left plenty of questions open about how they made the call to rush in and what happened inside the closet-sized hideout on a rural Alabama property, where the boy had been held by Jimmy Lee Dykes. But relatives said there was no question about the relief they feel.

"If I could, I would do cartwheels all the way down the road," the boy's great-aunt, Debra Cook, told ABC's Good Morning America on Tuesday. "We'd all been walking around in a fog."

She said the boy was happy and playing with his old toys, including a dinosaur. "He was having the biggest time," Cook said.

After FBI agents determined that talks with an increasingly agitated Dykes were breaking down, they stormed the shelter Monday afternoon and freed the kindergartner. The 65-year-old armed captor was killed by law enforcement agents, an official told The Associated Press.

Ex-prof due in court on Ala. university shooting

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:46:00 +0000

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — An ex-university professor who pleaded guilty to shooting six people during a faculty meeting in Alabama is headed to court for an abbreviated trial.

A judge scheduled jury selection Monday for Amy Bishop, a Harvard-educated biologist who went on the shooting spree at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Bishop pleaded guilty earlier this month to killing three people and wounding three others in February 2010. She avoided a possible death sentence with the plea and instead faces life imprisonment.

But a trial is still required under Alabama law because Bishop admitted to a capital charge of murder. So lawyers will select a jury and Circuit Judge Alan Mann will hold a brief trial.

Bishop awaits trial in the shotgun death of her brother in Massachusetts in 1986.

Death toll from Wednesday twisters up to 337

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:27:00 +0000

Southerners found their emergency safety net shredded Friday as they tried to emerge from the second-deadliest day for a twister outbreak in U.S. history.

Emergency buildings are wiped out. Bodies are stored in refrigerated trucks. Authorities are begging for such basics as flashlights. In one neighborhood, the storms even left firefighters to work without a truck.

The death toll from Wednesday's storms reached 337 across seven states, including at least 246 in Alabama.

The largest death toll ever was on March 18, 1925, when 747 people were killed in storms that raged through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. The second deadliest day had been in March 1932, when 332 people died, all in Alabama.

The 1925 outbreak was long before the days when Doppler radar could warn communities of severe weather. Forecasters have said residents were told these tornadoes were coming. But they were just too wide and powerful and in populated areas to avoid a horrifying body count.

Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured Wednesday -- 990 in Tuscaloosa alone -- and as many as 1 million Alabama homes and businesses remained without power.

The scale of the disaster astonished President Barack Obama when he arrived in the state Friday.

Mixed reviews for BP’s beach-cleaning efforts

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:29:35 +0000

What's typically a beautiful, quiet stretch of beach in the fall now resembles a construction site. Bulldozers and yellow dump trucks shake the ground; a giant sifting machine spits clean sand out one end, tar balls out another.

With its Macondo well dead and few visitors on the coast during the offseason, BP has launched its biggest push yet to deep-clean the tourist beaches that were coated with crude during the worst of the Gulf oil spill. Machines are digging down into the sand to remove buried tar mats left from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The work is getting mixed reviews. Many are anxious to see the beaches cleaned as quickly as possible by whatever means are available. Others say BP may be making matters worse by bringing heavy equipment onto beaches and spreading the petroleum stain.

Some fear fresh environmental damage from the work itself, which can kill tiny creatures that live in the sand. Even BP acknowledges that fresh tar balls are still hitting the coast, meaning some of the work might be premature. Still, local officials have given the company a Jan. 1 deadline to be done.

Tropical Storm Alex halts skimming operations off Gulf Coast

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:19:00 +0000

BP and the Coast Guard sent oil-scooping skimming ships in the Gulf of Mexico back to shore Tuesday because nasty weather from Tropical Storm Alex churned up rough seas and powerful winds.

U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Dave French said all efforts had been halted for now off the Louisiana coast. Efforts also had been halted off the coasts of Florida, Alabama and Louisiana.

French said workers were using the time off the water to replenish supplies and perform maintenance work on equipment.

"We're ready to go as soon as conditions allow us to get those people back out and fighting this oil spill," French said.

The loss of skimming work combined with 25 mph gusts driving water into the coast has left beaches especially vulnerable. In Alabama, the normally white beaches were streaked with long lines of oil, and tar balls collected on the sand. One swath of beach 40 feet wide was stained brown and mottled with globs of oil matted together.

Although Tropical Storm Alex was projected to stay well away from the spill zone before possibly making landfall as a hurricane over Mexico, its outer edges were causing problems out in the Gulf.

FBI paid Joran van der Sloot at least $15,000 in extortion sting

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:47:00 +0000

U.S. authorities paid Joran van der Sloot at least $15,000 in a sting operation and delayed arresting him because they were trying to help build a murder case against him in the 5-year-old slaying of Natalee Holloway in Aruba, two federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

During that delay, van der Sloot arrived in Lima, Peru, on May 14, and authorities say he has confessed to last week's killing of a 21-year-old woman in his hotel room there.

The law enforcement officials say the investigation into Holloway's unsolved murder was revived about six weeks ago when van der Sloot reached out to someone close to Holloway's mother in Alabama and requested $250,000 in exchange for disclosing the location of Holloway's body on the island of Aruba.

Aruba authorities have been frustrated in their efforts to prosecute van der Sloot because they have been unable to find her remains.

The officials said that Holloway's mother, Beth Twitty, contacted law enforcement authorities in Alabama, and the FBI set a sting operation in motion targeting van der Sloot. The agency wired $15,000 to a bank account he controlled, officials added.

BP spill forces choice between ecology and economy

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:28:00 +0000

Forced to perform a painful kind of environmental triage, emergency workers concentrated on protecting marshes and inlets from the approaching BP oil slick Thursday and left one of the Gulf Coast's biggest tourist attractions -- its white-sand beaches -- largely undefended.

As BP struggled a mile underwater to cut and cap the blown-out well, the decision to sacrifice parts of the shoreline -- made weeks ago by state and Coast Guard officials -- came under fire from Alabama's governor.

"We could lose an entire tourist season because of this. It would be absolutely devastating," Gov. Bob Riley said in an interview with The Associated Press. The state's two coastal counties deliver 35 percent of its tourism dollars, mostly spending by beachgoers.

In deciding to put the marshes first, emergency officials reasoned that they had enough time and containment boom to shield the Gulf's fragile ecology or its endangered economy, but not both. Also, they argued that beaches will be easier to clean, as well as harder to protect because of the action of the waves against the floating barriers.

The strategy pits environmentalists against the tourism industry, and also casts doubt on repeated promises by the Obama administration to bring to bear whatever resources are necessary to battle the spill.