Oldest boy surrenders in Idaho standoff

Associated Press

SANDPOINT, Idaho — The oldest boy in a backwoods stalemate between authorities and six frightened children has turned himself in, the first break in a four-day siege that began when the children’s mother was arrested for alleged child neglect.

Benjamin McGuckin, 15, was driven by a neighbor late Thursday to Sandpoint, about 10 miles north of the family’s decaying home near Garfield Bay.

Bonner County Prosecutor Phil Robinson said early Friday he hoped the boy could provide some insight "into how to wind this thing down."

Later, however, he said Benjamin was "not being uncooperative, but he is certainly apprehensive and not terribly open."

Still in the house are five of his siblings: Kathryn, 16; Mary, 13; James, 11; Frederick, 9; and Jane, 8.

The oldest sister, Erina, 19, who left the house after an earlier falling-out with her parents, has been working with authorities.

Erina McGuckin’s concerns about conditions at the home formed the basis of a charge against JoAnn McGuckin, the mother, who was arrested Tuesday for investigation of child neglect and held on $100,000 bail.

A bail-reduction hearing scheduled Friday afternoon was postponed when McGuckin’s court-appointed attorney, Bryce Powell, failed to appear.

Increasingly frustrated County Magistrate Debra Heise said Powell’s office would not even disclose his whereabouts.

By early evening, after a brief violent storm plunged the courthouse into darkness, Heise said she was going home. She indicated the hearing could be rescheduled if all the parties could get together.

McGuckin "is asking to communicate with her children," the prosecutor said.

There was speculation Powell might be at the Garfield Bay home.

A Verizon telephone service truck was seen leaving the barricaded area, but company officials couldn’t immediately confirm the company had been enlisted to provide a telephone link to the house. The family had no telephone, and efforts to negotiate had so far been conducted by bullhorn.

When deputies went to the house after McGuckin’s Tuesday arrest to collect the children, Benjamin yelled, "Get the guns!" and set loose the family’s more than two dozen dogs, Robinson said.

Deputies decided to wait the children out, anticipating they would run out of food quickly. However, the director of a local food bank said Thursday the family had received 200 pounds of staples last Friday, the day the children’s father, Michael McGuckin, was buried.

His death was the latest in a years-long series of disappointments and losses for the hard-luck McGuckins, those who know them say.

Benjamin apparently had been outside for some time — perhaps since Tuesday — before turning himself in, Robinson said. The house, in dense woods on a loop of dirt road, is beyond sight of roadblocks manned by deputies.

Although there was "some indication that he was suffering from malnutrition," the boy didn’t need to be hospitalized, Robinson said. He was in temporary "shelter care" provided by the state Department of Health and Welfare.

Robinson said the boy wasn’t the subject of a criminal investigation.

Attorney Edgar Steele of Sandpoint, who recently represented Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler in a lawsuit and told reporters he is representing the McGuckin family for free, had been working to keep the youngsters together.

"We believe he (Benjamin) has been placed with strangers," the attorney said.

Steele pressed for release of JoAnn McGuckin to end the standoff, saying the situation could draw anti-government activists from around the country to the Sandpoint area about 40 miles from the deadly 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, where a deputy federal marshal and white supremacist Randy Weaver’s wife and teen-age son were killed.

McGuckin "is perfectly capable of taking care of the kids and herself," he said.

Steele, who announced his involvement in the case Thursday, characterized claims that the children were neglected and malnourished as "pure rumor." He and the local electricity utility also disputed authorities’ claims that the house was without power.