Alabama: Hostage drama continues (+video)

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on its Hatewatch blog that a chief investigator with the Dale County Sheriff's Office identified the gunman as 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes, although Reuters could not independently verify the gunman's identity.

Investigator Tim Byrd said Dykes' friends and neighbors described him as a "survivalist" who did not trust the government, according to the law center blog.

"He was standoffish, didn't socialize or have any contact with anybody," Byrd told Hatewatch.

Dykes had not been on the law center's radar before the shooting and standoff, and there was nothing to suggest he was a member of any hate group, said senior fellow Mark Potok.

"What it looks like is that he's some kind of anti-government radical and survivalist," Potok told Reuters. "And exactly what that means, we don't know."

Court records show Dykes had been due to appear for a bench trial on Wednesday following his arrest last month on a menacing charge.

James Edward Davis, a neighbor of Dykes, told CNN the arrest stemmed from an incident on Dec. 10 when Dykes pulled a gun on him and his young daughter. According to Davis, Dykes was upset because he believed Davis had driven onto his property. Dykes fired two gunshots as Davis sped off in his car, he said.

"This man has been an accident waiting to happen. He's been a ticking time bomb," Ronda Wilbur, another neighbor of Dykes, told CNN, complaining he had killed her family dog by beating it with a lead pipe and then bragged about it to her husband.

"He got increasingly more bizarre. He spent most of the last two years moving concrete blocks around and digging, constantly digging and moving dirt," she said of Dykes.

Wilbur and other neighbors said Dykes had moved into the area about two years ago and kept mostly to himself.

(Reporting by Kaija Wilkinson in Mobile, Alabama; Additional reporting and writing by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Tom Brown, Andrew Hay and Lisa Shumaker)

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