Ala. town: Relief that child hostage is safe

MIDLAND CITY, Ala. (AP) — A 5-year-old boy was back with his ecstatic family and playing with his toy dinosaur after his nearly weeklong ordeal as a hostage in an underground bunker was ended by a sudden police raid and the death of his kidnapper.

The FBI and other law enforcement officials left plenty of questions open about how they made the call to rush in and what happened inside the closet-sized hideout on a rural Alabama property, where the boy had been held by Jimmy Lee Dykes. But relatives said there was no question about the relief they feel.

"If I could, I would do cartwheels all the way down the road," the boy's great-aunt, Debra Cook, told ABC's "Good Morning America" on today. "We'd all been walking around in a fog."

She said the boy was happy and playing with his old toys, including a dinosaur. "He was having the biggest time," Cook said.

After FBI agents determined that talks with an increasingly agitated Dykes were breaking down, they stormed the shelter Monday afternoon and freed the kindergartner. The 65-year-old armed captor was killed by law enforcement agents, an official told The Associated Press.