The 5-year-old Alabama boy snatched from his school bus at gunpoint and stashed with his abductor in a bunker is believed to be physically safe, police said Friday, on day three of the standoff.
“There’s no reason to believe the child has been harmed,” Dale County Sheriff Wally Olson said at a news briefing late Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
Various media have reported that medicine the boy is required to take daily has been tossed into the bunker.
It’s been more than three days since the suspect — Jimmy Lee Dykes, a 65-year-old retired truck driver — entered a school bus parked, shot the driver and grabbed one of the fleeing 22 children. He’s been holed in the bunker since; hostage negotiators on the scene have been communicating with him via a 4-inch-wide ventilation pipe that goes into the bunker, the Associated Press reports.
Media also reports that Mr. Dykes show no signs of ending the standoff.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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