Six armed children are holding off local Idaho police trying to get them out of their house today after authorities arrested their mother, a sheriff's office spokesman said this evening.
"They are armed," said Bonner County's SgtRobert Rahn, "but we're not surrounding them. We have been trying to make contact. They have not broken any laws.
"Their mother has been arrested and we're trying to get in there and help the kids," Sergeant Rahn said in a telephone interview from Sandpoint, a small northern Idaho community near the Canadian border.
The children, ranging in ages from 16 to eight, on Tuesday locked themselves in their home and loosed their pack of vicious dogs on the police, who have been staking out the house for about two weeks, next door neighbour Ms Mary Peters said.
"They still have a police block up there, and I haven't heard that the children have come out," Ms Peters said.
"They have no water, they have no electricity, they have no heat. They have nothing to eat.
"I've been crying about these little children because I knew them when they weren't afraid," she said. "I do believe they are starving and they are scared to death."
Ms Peters said authorities had arrested the children's mothe Ms JoAnn McGuckin on Tuesday on charges of child endangerment after her husband died two weeks ago. Mr Michael McGuckin had suffered from multiple sclerosis.
AFP