Peaceful Bear River Valley as seen from Hartt Wixoms office window near Cokeville, Wyo.(Photo: Hartt Wixom / For The Spectrum & Daily News)

As I write this, a most improbable thing is taking place. I am watching a full-length movie being made for the nations theatres, based on a book my wife Judene and I wrote, in which my grandchildren portray their parents. It tells of 134 children being held hostage in May of 1986 in a Cokeville, Wyoming, elementary school. Our 12-year old son, Kamron, was one of the hostages. The film is to be released into theatres April 8, 2015.

Working title? The Cokeville Miracle. Actually, Hollywood made a movie in 1994 about this Wyoming school being taken over by a deranged former police officer. But in the opinion of many, Hollywood missed the point. A major message was omitted about how all hostage children and teachers in the school managed to survive. The fact that they did was declared a miracle by investigative lawmen on the scene. Only the two perpetrators, David Young and his wife, Doris, died.

LDS film maker T. C. Christensen, who made Ephraims Rescue, portrays from lips of the children themselves how all the Cokeville captives survived. But Christensen did more than portray people. Even as I write this, the film-maker is shooting the unlikely tranquil environment in which it all happened. Horses and cattle in emerald-green pastures; rural Wyoming with its many trout streams, mule deer and sometimes a moose looking on. (I can see much of the above from my office window, one reason I decided to spend part time in western Wyoming.)

The question is: how could something like that happen in such a peaceful place? Cokeville had so little crime that many folks didnt bother to lock their doors. They do now ever since the Youngs barged in on the Cokeville Elementary School with guns and a bomb to demand $2 million for each child.

This in a town so small there wasnt even a bank. Explosives expert Richard Haskell of Rock Springs, Wyo. said the bomb didnt explode as designed. There should have been dead kids everywhere. My son would have been one of them.

The prototype did detonate perfectly when Young blew up a school bus near his home in Tucson, Ariz. Upon arriving in Cokeville, Young constructed a bomb to match the first. Known as a Dead Mans Bomb, it had a short trigger which could be detonated in half a second. If it had exploded as planned, the entire south wing of the Cokeville school building would have been destroyed, according to Haskell.

Even with that, Haskell said he expected children to die of smoke inhalation; three dozen children were treated for burns. My son, Kamron (who played a medic in the film), was near the doorway and escaped without a scratch. One teacher was shot but was back on the job four days later. Upon seeing his wife afire after she inadvertently triggered the bomb, David shot her and himself.

Haskell made this statement to local lawmen: I am not a religious man. But Ive witnessed a miracle here like Ive never seen.

It was one more reason why I wondered when doing this story in the book how I could possibly do it justice. All I can do, I told my wife, is write the story the way it was reported to me.

None of these children claimed as in two recent movies that they went to Heaven and back. But they did speak gratefully of divine help. And that is the message portrayed by Christensens movie.

During the shooting in a Layton school building, KSL Television and many northern Utah newspapers were on hand. When the incident actually occurred in 1986, newspapers from around the world arrived to tell how all the captives escaped. A reporter from the London Times, telephoning the crisis from a home near the school, fabricated on a few points (Faculty members were not doing their duty to disarm the perpetrators etc.).

The homeowner remarked that, The facts were sensational enough without making anything up.

The tragic part is that the demented invader, according to Youngs diaries analyzed by Sheriffs Deputy Ronald Hartley, planned to blow up the school regardless of ransom money. He tossed the vans keys to his daughter (who refused to go along with his plan at the last minute) and told her to Get out. He had no escape vehicle. He would take the money and the children with him to a Brave New World into the next life.

As I sit here now looking out across peaceful Bear River Valley from my mobile home window, I wonder how the above could have possibly happened in such a pastoral paradise. I can walk to 16-18 inch cutthroat trout and look at mule deer on many an evening. Horses and cattle graze in silence.

If there is a moral in all this, I guess it is that we must take precautions wherever we might be. Even in a quiet village of 536 souls.

Email Hartt Wixom at ivins140@aol.com.

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