7-Year-Old Wants To Thank Sharpshooter Who Killed Man

Seven-year-old Kristina Jacobson happily hugged two new teddy bears and arranged her Skittles candies by color on the blanket covering her legs, apparently unfazed by her ordeal.

A few hours earlier she had watched a police sharpshooter’s bullet slam into the head of her kidnapper as they sat in an overturned car on the median of Interstate 5 near Rice Hill.

“I can still picture him right in my head when he died,” Kristina said from her hospital bed. “Whoever shot him, I’m really happy. Whoever he is, I wish he would come in the room so I could thank him.”

A second-grader at McKinley Elementary School in Salem, Kristina had been dropped off at a home day care in Salem before school by her parents, Richard and Shanna Jacobson.

Kristina said she was taped hand and foot with duct tape and sitting on the couch of the baby sitter’s home when the gunman chose her for a hostage.

“He had this little silver gun he put up on my head,” she said. “He said if I don’t behave, he will put me in the trunk or shoot me.

“I was crying and asking him lots of questions. ‘Where are you going to drop me off? When are you going to drop me off?”

After police shot the gunman, Kristina used a Bambi book she found in the car to break out a window and run to police.