Photog Causes Panic In Small Town Parents Concerned When Pictures Taken Of Children Boarding Bus

Confusion about the identity of a man snapping photographs of children leaving on a school bus created a near-panic among parents in the small, rural community of Eden.

Times-News photographer Buddy Mangine was shooting pictures Aug. 24 for an article about back-to-school safety. But as rumors flew, some families boycotted school buses for about a week and several people armed themselves with weapons, Jerome County Sheriff’s Lt. Gerald Brant said.

“It wasn’t just a couple of older women getting all paranoid because a car went down the road,” farmer Jim Taylor said. “It got out of hand.”

In an attempt to discover the photographer’s identity, one resident hired a private investigator who was promptly questioned by police last Friday for lurking around a school bus with binoculars and a camera.

People saw the increased police presence and rumors spread “like a brush fire with a 50 mile-per-hour wind behind it,” said Taylor, whose two children were escorted to the bus for the past week. “It just kept getting worse and worse and worse.

“When your child becomes involved, first you react, then common sense kicks in later,” he said. “Once we understood it, it became kind of a comedy of errors.”

Mangine said he contacted a Valley School District secretary before taking the photos. But Superintendent Arlyn Bodily said he did not think anyone was notified.

“I don’t think Mr. Mangine did anything inappropriate, but obviously the circumstances combined to cause a problem that we don’t want to see repeated,” Times-News managing editor Clark Walworth said. “I will be reminding all of our staff members to be sensitive about letting people know who we are and what we’re doing.”