Authorities sorting out Amber Alert case

Five young children remained in foster care in North Idaho on Wednesday and a self-described traveling preacher remained behind bars in Coeur d’Alene while police try to figure out if there was a kidnapping or not last week.

John Marc Thompson, 56, was in the Kootenai County Jail on Wednesday, held on a $500,000 arrest warrant but still not charged with any kind of kidnapping. The warrant was issued last weekend when the area was in the grip of a nationwide Amber Alert following a report that two little kids, ages 4 and 5, were traveling with Thompson and that his gold Lincoln Town Car became separated from other rigs ferrying the kids’ families to a campsite in Bonner County one week ago.

Concern for the safety of Tatiana Siebert, 4, and Ford Ware, 5, heightened when a records check revealed Thompson was wanted in four states for theft and embezzlement.

The children were found Monday – with siblings and kin – at a campsite south of Priest Lake. They were safe, police said, but not sound.

“My officers were distressed by the condition of the kids,” Lt. John Valdez of the Bonner County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday.

To police, it appeared the children were malnourished and suffering other health threats from a transient lifestyle living out of cars in remote campsites, several officers have said. A doctor’s exam showed “the children, basically, were failing to thrive,” Valdez said. “One of them was 35 percent below his average weight for his age. They had a lot of problems.”

Bonner County detectives placed Tatiana, Ford and three other children – ranging in age from 4 months to 5 years – in foster care, where they remain.

Shelter hearings on Wednesday morning in Bonner County court were delayed to give state child welfare inspectors time to assess the kids and their families, a courthouse source said.

No date has been set for resuming the hearings.

Neither is there a date set for charging Thompson with kidnapping. Lansing Haynes, chief deputy prosecutor for Kootenai County, said Wednesday he was still awaiting a final police report into the tangled affair.

Thompson, who ditched criminal charges in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arizona and Colorado, apparently rolled the Town Car three weeks ago into a wooded campground in the Bitterroots where three generations of an extended family had been camping out. Yvonne Siebert had recently lost a job in Salmon.

Her sister Jennifer Anderson lost a child in a Moscow trailer fire last fall. Siebert and Anderson, sisters, took to the road with their mom, Brenda Moore, boyfriends and a total of six children.

In three battered rigs, the family members traveled to campgrounds across North Idaho, looking for work.

Thompson soon gained their trust, family members said, with his claims of being a preacher, and by sharing a scheme to make money by taking apart catalytic converters to recover precious metals.

When the troupe, joined by Thompson, became separated at the Interstate 90 and U.S. Highway 95 interchange last Thursday, Yvonne Siebert and Moore believed Thompson had vanished with Tatiana and Ford in his car.

It appears, however, that Thompson merely drove to the campsite everyone was aiming for and waited there with Anderson, her boyfriend Les Ward, and five of the six kids, apparently trusting Siebert and Moore would eventually show up.

Instead, Siebert and Moore reported the children missing to Coeur d’Alene police who, when Thompson’s criminal record popped up, issued an Amber Alert last Friday, which turned into a major weekend investigation.

Siebert and other family members were furious Monday that as police proclaimed a “happy outcome” with the children recovered, their kids were taken away to foster care.

“I understand someone might be upset about it,” Valdez said. “We have to look to the welfare of children when it appears, through circumstances or neglect, no one is taking proper care of them. These are kids from the cradle to 5 – we’re not talking teenagers here.”

Lt. Don Jiran of the Coeur d’Alene Police Department voiced a similar view: “Our primary concern was the welfare of the children.”

Jiran shrugged aside criticism that police may have been overly harsh with the traveling clan because they were poor and transient.

Coeur d’Alene Police assigned all its detectives to the search, Jiran said. “For three days all of our other cases sat. And I’m not complaining,” Jiran said. Other local, state and federal agencies kicked in to help in the search.

“These kids couldn’t take care of themselves. If they were all adults? Well, OK, they can take care of themselves. But these kids couldn’t,” Jiran said.

“Those living conditions are not conducive to healthy kids.”