Alabama’s Kindergarten hostage held for a third day

A 5-year-old boy has been held in a 6-by-8-foot bunker for two nights after being kidnapped off his Alabama school bus by a gunman, reports ABC News.

Neighbors have named the suspect as 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes. Pinckard, Ala.

Police Chief James Arrington told ABC that the bunker in Dykes' rural backyard is 4 feet underground and has a 60-foot plastic pipe coming out of it, which Dykes has been using to communicate with police.

"He will have to give up sooner or later because [authorities] are not leaving," Arrington told ABC.

"It's pretty small, but he's been known to stay in there eight days."

Authorities have been surrounding the bunker since Tuesday afternoon when Dykes allegedly demanded a student be released from a bus carrying 20 children, reports Reuters.

The 66-year-old bus driver Charles Albert Poland Jr. was shot multiple times after he refused to hand a child over to Dykes.

Police say Dykes then fled the scene with a kindergarten student.

The Los Angeles Times reports that heavily armed SWAT teams are surrounding the bunker but officials have said they intend to wait out the suspect and avoid using force.

“They’re still talking,” Robin Litchfield, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety, told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday.

“Negotiators are negotiating and the boy is OK.”