SANDPOINT, Idaho (AP) - For years, Michael and JoAnn McGuckin kept
their children close to their dilapidated rural home, fearing illness
and imagined government plots to take the home and split up the family.

     Now the six youngest, ages 8 to 16, are  holed up inside with a
stash of rifles and a pack of vicious dogs.

    With their father dead and their mother arrested, they are refusing
to answer negotiators who have been trying since  Tuesday to coax them out.
The children released the dogs when deputies first approached the house,
and one yelled ``Get the guns!'' before the officers pulled back, Sheriff  Jarvis said.

    ``I'm not going to force an issue with children,'' Jarvis said Wednesday.
``We are waiting for them to calm down. We want to convince them we are there to help.''

     In the minds of many in the area is the 1992 shootout at nearby Ruby Ridge,
where the wife and son of white separatist Randy Weaver were killed during a
standoff with federal agents. But Jarvis said this standoff is different because
authorities aren't out to arrest anyone inside the home.

     It was triggered by Tuesday's arrest of JoAnn McGuckin, 46, on a
warrant charging felony injury to a child. Jarvis declined to elaborate on the charge.

    Deputies lured her from the house Tuesday with grocery money, and she was
taken into custody after going to a store with a deputy who had brought the cash.

    But when deputies returned to take the children to state social services,
the children locked themselves inside the home.

   ``This is a mentally ill woman and she has her children scared to death,'' Jarvis said.

     The stalemate at the McGuckin home, on a dirt road about a mile from the tiny
Lake Pend Oreille community of Garfield Bay,  continued early Thursday. It wasn't
clear whether the children were communicating with officials.

    Mary Peters, who knew the McGuckins, said the family was more
sociable before Michael became ill with multiple sclerosis.

   She brought out a decade-old photo of the family in a church directory
showing a smiling Michael and JoAnn McGuckin and five of their eight children.
Michael worked in a lumber mill to support his family then, she said.

    The illness and the financial struggles that followed took a mental toll on JoAnn,
Peters said. She became convinced her husband's illness was caused by chemicals
sprayed on the roads, and that  the government was planning to take the children
and their home, Peters said.

   ``We haven't seen the kids for five years,'' she said.

      The home is now rundown and no longer has power, water or heat.
The children, kept home from school, have been largely caring for themselves,
subsisting on water dragged from the lake and what food they can find, Jarvis said.
The family refused help from social service agencies.

    When Michael McGuckin died three weeks ago, the official cause of
death was dehydration and malnutrition.

     A 19-year-old sister who left the home recently after an argument with
her mother was helping deputies try to draw the children out, Jarvis said.

     They have told the children over a loudspeaker that they will be
fed, housedand taken to see their mother, he said.

    The Rev. Dennis Day, who officiated Michael McGuckin's funeral at
St. Joseph Catholic Church in Sandpoint, about 10 miles from Garfield
Bay, said the family rebuffed all offers of help and seemed consumed by paranoia.

    The oldest of the children now lives in California and has little
contact with his family, Day said.

    ``Everybody saw this coming. They were dirt-poor. The kids didn't
have the right things to eat,'' Day said. ``They really alienated themselves from the world.''

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/breakingnews/US/0,3560,946713,00.html
 

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