A father and son were arrested for the kidnapping of two U.S. Forest Service employees in rural northern California, federal prosecutors announced Friday.
The hostage situation occurred in a remote part of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest located north of Redding. The area around Gumboot Lake in Siskiyou County was closed off during the standoff.
Joseph Charles Hendrickson, who was with his son Phoenix, had the two workers — whom authorities refused to identify — zip-tied and held at gunpoint inside a trailer nearby a lake, said Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue of Siskiyou County.
A call came in around 10 a.m. yesterday to the sheriff’s office, said LaRue. Hendrickson had firearms, ammunition, and wanted to speak with the FBI.
Deputies arrived at the location around noon, the sheriff said, and used drones to identify the trailer and to begin communicating with Hendrickson. It wasn’t until 4:20 p.m. last night that negotiations began and at 1:50 a.m. the workers were released.
“It was a large incident and I’d like to tell you it’s probably the smoothest thing I’ve seen in years,” he said.
The hours-long law enforcement response between local, state and federal agencies also managed to get Hendrickson to surrender himself out of the trailer along with his son.
In addition to drones, local law enforcement deployed a SWAT team, a sniper unit, a bomb unit and a bunch more personnel.
An hostage rescue team was even flown all way from the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, to assist with the situation, officials confirmed at a Friday presser.
“I talked about it’s a dynamic situation, right? So at any point, it can go from under control to very dangerous,” said a local law enforement official. “We felt we had time, better to get them spun up and out here just in case.”
The suspects did not have any history with local law enforcement, officials said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
