Father held after bodies of five children found in Alabama

A South Carolina man led US authorities to the bodies of his five children in rural Alabama, ending a six-day search that had stretched across the South, law enforcement officials said.

Sheriff Earnest Evans of Wilcox County, Alabama, said that investigators had recovered the bodies of the children, all aged 1 to 8 years-old, in a rural area near Camden, more than an hour southwest of Montgomery. He said he did not know the cause of the children’s deaths.

The sheriff's department in Lexington County, South Carolina, where the children were reported missing by their mother on September 3rd identified the father as Timothy Ray Jones Jr. A department spokesman said Mr Jones (32) would be charged initially with unlawful neglect of a child by a legal custodian, although officials expected to file additional charges.

Mr Evans said investigators had begun an intense search early yesterday after Mississippi officials, who detained the father at a motor vehicle checkpoint in Smith County, contacted them with information about the children. "The investigators called me last night and told me what the suspect had said: that he had dropped those kids off in a rural area in Wilcox County or Butler County," Mr Evans said.

But investigators were at first unable to find the children. The Mississippi authorities, Mr Evans said, soon took the father to Alabama to assist in locating them. “He showed us pretty much where it was,” said Mr Evans, who added that officials were still processing the scene, at least 200 yards off a highway, last night and were awaiting forensics specialists. A South Carolina coroner was preparing to transport the bodies to Lexington County for autopsies.

Mr Jones was taken back to Smith County, Mississippi, where he was being held. Sheriff Charlie Crumpton of Smith County could not be reached immediately last night. Earlier, Mr Crumpton told The Clarion Ledger, in Jackson, Mississippi, that he could not “imagine what goes through a man’s head when he does this; it was a horrible, horrible crime,” he said.

The Lexington County sheriff’s department said in a statement that Mr Jones had joint custody of the children after a divorce and that his former wife had sometimes “been unable to contact her ex-husband.”

He had told neighbours, the department said, that he planned to move with the children to another state.

The disappearance of the children set off a search that included the FBI, and Mr Evans said officials had determined that Mr Jones withdrew money from an Alabama bank on Saturday morning.

Mr Evans said the discovery of the bodies was deeply unsettling in his impoverished county of 11,300, where months often pass without homicides. “This is our first time ever having anything like this here in Wilcox County,” he said. “It’s almost unheard-of here.”

New York Times