On January 29, 2013, a hostage crisis began in the Wiregrass Region near U.S. Highway 231 in Midland City, Alabama, and lasted almost seven days. Jimmy Lee Dykes, a 65-year-old Vietnam War-era veteran, boarded a Dale County school bus that had stopped in Midland City and demanded to take two boys, ages six and eight, from the bus. The driver, 66-year-old Charles Albert Poland Jr., refused, blocked the aisle, and challenged Dykes to shoot him. Dykes fired five shots, killing Poland, and left the bus with five-year-old Ethan Gilman, a Midland City Elementary School student. Authorities said there was no pre-existing relationship between Dykes and the child he abducted. A 15-year-old student on the bus, Tre' Watts, was the first to call 911, beginning the call as soon as Dykes boarded.
Dykes took Gilman to a 6-foot by 8-foot underground bunker on his property that was equipped with a PVC ventilation pipe and contained homemade bombs. He called 911 himself and instructed responders on how to communicate with him through the pipe. FBI hostage negotiators engaged with Dykes over several days. Because Gilman had Asperger's syndrome and ADHD, Dykes accepted medication for the child, along with a coloring book and crayons, sent through the ventilation pipe. Investigators later said Dykes wanted a specific female reporter to hold his hand while broadcasting him live from the bunker, during which he intended to die by suicide on live television, and that he had been "training" Gilman to detonate the improvised explosive devices inside the bunker.
On February 4, 2013, at 3:12 p.m. CST, after negotiations began to break down and agents saw via a hidden camera that Dykes was holding a gun, the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team breached the bunker roof with explosive charges, threw stun grenades inside, and exchanged gunfire with Dykes, killing him and rescuing Gilman, who was taken to the hospital in reported good condition. Two improvised explosive devices were later found, one inside the PVC pipe and one inside the bunker.
Dykes, a decorated Vietnam War Navy veteran, had lived in isolation near Midland City and reportedly lost contact with his two daughters years before the incident. He had prior arrests in Florida for brandishing a gun (1995) and for marijuana possession (2000), and neighbors described him beating a neighbor's dog to death with an iron pipe, warning children off his property, building a speed bump, and patrolling with a shotgun and flashlight. He was due in court the day before the standoff for a menacing case alleging he had fired a gun at neighbors.
In the aftermath, Ethan Gilman and his mother, Jennifer Kirkland, were interviewed by Dr. Phil on February 14, 2013. The bunker was demolished by officials on February 26, 2013, due to a stated "biological risk." Gilman was later raised by his grandmother, then his 18-year-old brother, before being adopted by a local minister's family; as of February 2019 he was living in Dothan, Alabama under the name Ethan Turner. Alabama subsequently enacted the Charles "Chuck" Poland, Jr. Act, criminalizing trespass onto a school bus, signed into law by Governor Robert J. Bentley in June 2013.
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