By John Howell
Federal officials late Friday assumed jurisdiction of an investigation into circumstances that triggered an Amber Alert for a two-year-old toddler taken at gunpoint from his Jackson home.
The Amber Alert was cancelled Friday afternoon when the child was recovered on North Sycamore Street in Como.

“The FBI is going to handle this,” Panola County Sheriff Dennis Darby said Friday night shortly after Panola and Tate County officers and Como police had converged on the home where they believed the child to have been taken.

“Apparently there was more to it than we thought,” Darby said. “They (the FBI) wanted it and usually when another agency says that they’ve got a strong case.”

Mississippi Bureau of Investigation had initiated the Amber Alert for Isaiah Summerall who was reported to have been taken at gunpoint early Thursday morning from his mother at Cypress Pointe Apartments in Jackson.

According to Memphis News Channel 3, the boy’s grandmother and other relatives held the mother at gunpoint while they took the boy. The television report also stated that several shots were fired into the air as the abductors left. The Amber Alert stated that the child may have been in the company of Ricky Dandridge Jr.

Darby said that a Tate County Deputy Sheriff got information that the child, his grandmother and others alleged to have been involved were at at home at 616 North Sycamore Street in Como.
The child’s mother had also come to the home, but she, apparently sensing that officers were about to converge, left with the child and drove to Senatobia where she picked up a friend.

When officers arrived, the occupants did not respond to knocks on the door, Darby said. The officers entered and found three people hiding in various rooms in the house. They also discovered a red vehicle that had been described in the Amber Alert parked behind a shed at the rear of the property. Inside the trunk, they found another person hiding.

After questioning, the grandmother told officers that the mother had taken the child and had driven to Tate County. The grandmother called the mother by cell phone and told the law enforcement officials that she was returning to the Sycamore Street address.

Several times during her conversation the grandmother said that her daughter is “bipolar” and asked them not to spook her.

Several law enforcement vehicles spotted the daughter with the child and the Senatobia friend driving toward Como and followed, which momentarily spooked the mother who turned in a direction that would take her in a different direction from the home where officials waited. That triggered a scramble among the law enforcement officials who had gathered on Sycamore Street. They ran to their vehicles and drove away to assist in the child’s recovery.

Moments later, a small green car driven by the mother and carrying the two passengers approached the home, driving into the front yard where officers and the grandmother waited. The mother was coaxed into handing the child to the grandmother.

Officials then coaxed the mother from the driver’s seat and eventually handcuffed her. The mother, grandmother and child were transported away in a sheriff’s department vehicle.