• Investigators: Explosives found in hostage bunker; kidnapper shot first

    FBI

    A tent covers the bunker where where a 5-year-old child was rescued by law enforcement after being held for nearly a week. FBI agents placed the blue tent over the bunker to protect evidence below.

    By Matthew DeLuca and Gabe Gutierrez, NBC News

    Federal investigators late Tuesday revealed that they have found explosives in the bunker where a 5-year-old Alabama boy was held hostage for nearly a week -- and that the kidnapper was killed only after opening fire first himself.

    According to a law enforcement source close to the investigation, two explosives -- one inside the bunker and one in the ventilation pipe -- were found at the scene.

    The source said four members of the rescue team approached the bunker's hatch Monday, where the captor, 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes, was expecting a delivery.

    He had received food and other items intended for the boy in previous days. This time, however, the team opened the hatch and dropped a "distractionary device" -- more commonly known as a flashbang.

    Dykes was disoriented, but managed to fire off one shot.

    The rescue team fired back -- shooting Dykes dead -- and saved the boy.

    A law enforcement source close to the investigation confirmed to NBC News on Tuesday that federal agents had practiced their intricate rescue plans not far from where the kidnapper, Dykes, held the little boy.

    Before storming the underground shelter where Dykes held the boy on Monday, the agents built a mock bunker nearby where they prepared over the prior six days, according to a law enforcement official close to the investigation.

    FBI

    FBI agents and Dale County negotiators used this pipe to communicate with Jimmy Dykes.

    Police had been in regular contact with Dykes since he took the young boy, identified only as Ethan, into the homemade bunker last Tuesday. Authorities passed medicine and toys including a red Hot Wheels car to the boy, who is said to have Asperger’s syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and talked to Dykes through a PVC pipe that ran from the bunker into the yard.

    Dykes had been reported to have electric heaters and blankets in his bunker, as well as electricity. But hope for a peaceful end to the standoff came to an end when negotiators began to fear that Dykes might pose an immediate threat to the young boy.

    “Within the past 24 hours, negotiations deteriorated and Mr. Dykes was observed holding a gun,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen E. Richardson said at a press conference after the standoff ended. “At this point, FBI agents, fearing the child was in imminent danger, entered the bunker and rescued the child.”

    During a news conference with Alabama school officials, Donny Bynum, superintendent of Dale County Schools, says, "We have a long way to go. We have a healing process that we as a community must go through.'

    Law enforcement officials have said they even managed to sneak a camera into the roughly 8 feet by 6 feet bunker where Dykes holed up, but have declined to say how.

    “It’s a technique we may want to use again, so we’re not being specific,” an official told NBC News.

    The final rush to bring Ethan to safety began suddenly on Monday afternoon.

    Neighbor Byron Martin heard a boom that “made me jump off the ground.” Local paper the Dothan Eagle reported two loud blasts after 3 p.m. 

    It seems the bang was the first – and most audible – sign to people in the area that Ethan’s ordeal was close to an end. The flashbang explosive gave the FBI time to breach the bunker through a door at the top at 3:12 p.m. The boy emerged unharmed, according to officials.


    The source said that law enforcement officials were still searching Dykes’ 1.5 acre property in the rural Alabama community for explosives on Tuesday afternoon. Neighbors had described Dykes in the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping as a paranoid Navy veteran who had beaten at least one neighborhood pet to death.

    And why Dykes decided to storm a school bus and take a hostage in the first place remained unclear to investigators. Dykes missed a court appearance on a menacing charge on Wednesday morning, the day after the kidnapping. Officials have not commented on whether that court appearance may have motivated Dykes.

    Hostage suspect was loner, missed court appearance

    “There are a variety of events that may have led to this,” the law enforcement source close to the investigation told NBC on Tuesday. “But they are very complex.”

    NBC News can now confirm that Dykes asked negotiators to allow a TV reporter to interview him. A law enforcement source said while that request is an indication of Dykes' thirst for attention, the motive for the kidnapping is more complex, and officials will continue to investigate.

    President Obama offered his thanks to the FBI on Monday night.

    “This evening, the President called FBI director Robert Mueller to compliment him for the role federal law enforcement officers played in resolving the hostage situation in Alabama today,” a White House official said in a statement. “The President praised the exceptional coordination between state, local, and federal partners, and thanked all the law enforcement officials involved during the nearly week long ordeal for their roles in the successful rescue of the child.”

    The young boy was “laughing, joking, playing, eating,” said Agent Richardson Monday. “He’s very brave, he’s very lucky. His success story is that he got out and he’d doing great.”

    'Greatest birthday' for boy rescued from Alabama bunker by FBI

    “If I could, I would do cartwheels all the way down the road,” Debra Cook, the boy’s aunt, told Good Morning America. “I was ecstatic.”

    Ethan will celebrate his sixth birthday on Wednesday. Dale County School District officials have said that they are planning a celebration of Ethan’s birthday and the life of slain bus driver Charles Albert Poland, Jr. for another date.

    NBC’s Pete Williams and Isolde Raftery contributed reporting.

  • Son says bus driver in Alabama hostage crisis gave life for 'his children'

    The family of the bus driver killed for refusing to hand over children is speaking out for the first time. NBC's Gabe Gutierrez reports.

    By Matthew DeLuca and M. Alex Johnson, NBC News

    The school bus driver killed this week in an Alabama hostage drama took bullets for the children on his bus just as he would have for his own kids, his son says.


    When a child boarded Charles Albert Poland Jr.’s bus, “they were no longer their parents’, they were his,” Aaron Poland told NBC News. “And I know that’s the reason why my dad took those shots. It was for his children, just like he would do for me and my sister.”

    Authorities say Jimmy Lee Dykes, a Vietnam veteran and survivalist, boarded Poland's bus on Tuesday and demanded two children. When Poland refused, Dykes shot him, authorities say. They say Dykes took a 5-year-old boy hostage and has been holed up in an underground bunker with him ever since.

    Poland, 66, had driven a school bus for Dale County since 2009. Authorities said they found four shell casings at the scene.

    "I expected them to say he had a heart attack or got in to a car wreck. Never in my wildest dreams did I think he'd get shot, and shot four times," Poland's sister, Vicki Upchurch, said Thursday.

    Upchurch, who lives in Athol, Idaho, told NBC station KHQ of Spokane, Wash., that Poland family grew up in northern Idaho, where much of the family still lives. Relatives were planning to travel from Idaho to Alabama for his funeral services this weekend.

    "We will get through this," Upchurch said. "My brother was very religious. He had a deep faith."

    Poland joined the Army in the 1960s and moved to Alabama, where he married and had lived ever since, Upchurch said. She said he retired as a diesel mechanic in 2009 and had been driving a school bus to help support his wife until she was able to retire.

    "My brother would have done anything to protect those kids," she said.

    Schools Superintendent Donny Bynum said in a statement Wednesday that "Mr. Poland was well-loved by all of us here at Dale County Schools."

    Hostage suspect was loner, missed court appearance

    Poland's wife, Jan, remembered the man known to friends as "Chuck" as a gentle, caring man in an interview with a local newspaper, The Dothan Eagle.

    Dale County Board of Education

    Dale County bus driver Charles Poland, 66, was killed Tuesday.

    Friends and family gathered Wednesday at the couple's home in Newton, about a 15-minute drive from Midland City, according to the paper.

    "He loved them," she said of the friends and family shocked by Poland's violent death. "He loved everybody and he was loved."

    Terry Roberts, a firefighter and youth pastor in Newton, told the Eagle that he had known Poland for most of his life.

    Those who knew him are in "total shock," Roberts told the paper.

    "The kids, everybody's just in total shock," Roberts said. "I've got a young child, so it really hits home."

    The Dale County Sheriff's Department offered its condolences to Poland's family in a press release Wednesday.

    "It says in the Bible the meek will inherit the Èarth," Poland's brother-in-law Melvin Skipper told the Eagle. "He was the meekest man I knew."

    Alabama bunker hostage boy's family is 'holding on by a thread'

    While neighbors have described Dykes, 65, as a paranoid survivalist who was always digging in his yard with a shovel, Poland's neighbor Hilburn Benton told the Eagle that the bus driver once helped him complete a major yard project and asked nothing in return.

    "He told me, 'You're my friend and you're my neighbor. I'm not charging you a dime,'" Benton told the paper.

    Schools in Dale County and in neighboring Ozark city were to remain closed for the rest of the week, according to a release Wednesday from the Dale County Board of Education.