On January 29, 2013, a hostage crisis, lasting almost seven days, began in the Wiregrass Region near U.S. Highway 231 in Midland City, Alabama.

Jimmy Lee Dykes, a 65-year-old Vietnam War-era veteran, boarded a Dale County school bus, killed the driver, and took a five-year-old boy hostage.

The school bus driver, 66-year-old Charles Albert Poland, Jr., refused to let him take the children and challenged Dykes to shoot him.

Dykes fired five shots,[4] killing Poland, and left the bus taking Ethan Gilman, a five-year-old from Midland City Elementary School, with him.

[4] On February 4, 2013, at 3:12 p.m. CST, the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team breached the roof of the bunker using explosive charges after negotiations began to break down and they saw, using a hidden camera, Dykes holding a gun.

[10] Dykes had cleared a path on his property for school buses to take, and he had started speaking to Charles Poland weeks prior to the incident.

[18] As of February 2019, just days after the sixth anniversary of the end of the bunker crisis, the family was living in Dothan, Alabama, where the newly-turned 12-year-old Gilman (now Ethan Turner) was in fifth grade at a local elementary school.