Free Republic

ABBEVILLE — Even as the 14-hour armed standoff with authorities was beginning early Monday morning at her barricaded home a mile or so away, a helpless Rita Bixby was turning to her own decades-old weapon of choice: The law. Holed up inside her son’s Abbeville Arms Apartment with her adult disabled son, the 71-year-old decided to fire off a call to the state Attorney General’s Office. She left a voice mail message — strident, but calmly worded — still asserting the family’s legal right to land the state department of transportation had bought in the mid-1960s to widen S.C. 72...

After agonizing for hours about the condition of Abbeville County sheriff’s Sgt. Danny Wilson, hostage negotiators using a robot finally learned his fate. A video camera mounted in the robot showed the 36-year-old deputy lying in a pool of his own blood — with his hands cuffed behind his back — about 10 feet inside the home of Rita and Arthur Bixby. His death was a bitter blow to State Law Enforcement Division Chief Robert Stewart, whose SWAT agents had tried desperately all day to win the officer’s release, hoping he was still alive. They later would learn that Wilson...

ABBEVILLE, S.C. (AP) - A father and son angered by a state plan to seize some of their land allegedly shot and killed an officer who went to the home, sparking a 13-hour standoff that ended in a "horrendous gunfight" in which another officer was killed, authorities and neighbors said. At least 100 officers surrounded the rural home of Arthur Bixby in western South Carolina on Monday. Bixby's wife then holed up in an apartment in town and threatened to shoot bystanders if her husband or son were injured; she was promptly arrested, State Law Enforcement Division Chief Robert Stewart...