Alabama gunman kills bus driver, seizes boy

[Ahso!]

The gunman, identified by neighbors as Jimmy Lee Dykes, a 65-year-old retired truck driver, was known as “the crazy man” of the neighborhood, a paranoid and menacing figure who once beat a dog to death with a lead pipe, threatened to shoot children for setting foot on his property and patrolled his yard at night with a flashlight and a shotgun.

He had been scheduled to appear in court Wednesday morning to answer charges he shot at his neighbors in a dispute last month over a speed bump.

The standoff dragged on through the night and into the afternoon Wednesday after the gunman boarded a stopped school bus in the small town of Midland City on Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. Sheriff Wally Olsen said the man shot the driver when he refused to hand over a 6-year-old child. The gunman then took the kindergartener away.




Alabama gunman kills bus driver, seizes boy - Salon.com