Police negotiators are still trying to bargain with an Alabama gunman, more than 48 hours after he abducted a five-year-old boy from his school bus and is holding him hostage in his underground bunker.

The suspect, Jimmy Lee Dykes, age 65, who also allegedly shot dead the driver of the bus when he tried to protect the children, is being described as a ‘paranoid survivalist’ with ‘anti-American views’.

He is fiercely protective of his property in rural Midland City, Alabama.

Neighbors said he beat one of their dogs to death with a pipe after it ran onto his land and pulled a gun on the the man who lives next door and his daughter after a dispute over a speed bump.

The boy, named Ethan known to his mother as Love Bug, is autistic, authorities have said.

Dykes has allowed police to pass his medication and crayons through a PVC pipe that supplies air to the underground bunker.

“The negotiators are still communicating with the suspect,” Robyn Bradley Litchfield, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety, told the Reuters Thursday afternoon.

“He doesn’t want to hurt the child. He didn’t take the child to hurt him,” said the former negotiator, Clint Van Zandt, also an analyst for MSNBC. “The child is simply the means to keep law enforcement from crashing into his bunker right now.”

He added: “Time is on the side of the negotiator.”

One report suggested it could still be a long wait.

James Arrington, police chief of the nearby town of Pinckard, told The Birmingham News that Dykes has been known to stay in his bunker as long as eight days.

The bus driver, Charles Albert Poland Jr., 66, has been hailed as a hero.

The county school system said 21 children made it off the bus alive, and NBC station WSFA reported that the boy may have been captured after he was murdered by Dykes.