The Alabama Senate began its 2013 session by passing a resolution memorializing a school bus driver shot to death while trying to stop a kidnapping.
The senator representing Dale County, independent Harri Anne Smith of Slocomb, got the Senate to vote unanimously Tuesday for her resolution praising Dale County school bus driver Charles Albert Poland Jr. for trying to stop a kidnapping on his bus last week. The kidnapper kept a 5-year-old boy in an underground bunker until Monday, when law enforcement officers killed him and rescued the boy.
Smith called Poland's death "a really tragic experience." Smith said she talked with the boy's family Tuesday morning, and he "is doing very well."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.