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American Morning

Fugitives Captured in Ohio; Killer Released; Al Qaeda Tape?

Aired August 11, 2005 - 09:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

SOLEAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: A husband and wife wanted for the deadly ambush of a Tennessee prison guard are captured and now heading for court.
The confessed killer of four classmates and a teacher seven years ago at his Jonesboro, Arkansas, middle school is about to be set free.

And Tropical Storm Irene is gaining strength. Will she hit the U.S. as a hurricane? We're keeping a close eye on this AMERICAN MORNING.

ANNOUNCER: From the CNN Broadcast Center in New York, this is AMERICAN MORNING with Soledad O'Brien and Miles O'Brien.

O'BRIEN: Good morning. Welcome, everybody. Miles O'Brien is on a little vacation, but Carol's helping us out today.

Good morning.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. I switched seats.

Good morning, everyone.

Coming up, we're going to talk with terrorism analyst Peter Bergen about the most recent al Qaeda tape and its authenticity. It has that I.D. from a Navy SEAL in it, a gun apparently belonging to him.

We'll find out what all of that means.

O'BRIEN: Yes, very disturbing pictures, I think it's fair to say.

First, though, we begin with the capture of a fugitive husband and wife. George Hyatte headed for federal court today. His wife Jennifer being treated for a gunshot wound. After 36 hours on the run, the suspected killers were cornered last night in Columbus, Ohio.

We have team coverage this morning. Alina Cho live for us in Columbus, and Bob Franken live in Kingston, Tennessee.

First, with Alina.

Alina, what's next for George and Jennifer Hyatte?

ALINA CHO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Soledad, good morning to you. George Hyatte is expected to make a court appearance here in Ohio later today. As for his wife Jennifer, we are told that she is still being treated for a gunshot wound to the leg that she suffered during Tuesday's dramatic escape.

As most of you have heard by now, the couple was captured late last night at this motel here in Columbus. Investigators also found in the Hyattes' motel room, half-eaten food, an empty Hawaiian Punch can, and a messy bed.

Now, investigators were tipped off by a cab driver who drove the couple from another motel about 100 miles away to this location. That was yesterday.

Authorities immediately surrounded the motel and called the Hyattes' motel room, giving them an option, saying, either you come out or we're going in after you. The Hyattes decided immediately to surrender peacefully.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BOLEN, EARLIER ON AMERICAN MORNING: With the years of experience I have doing this, I see this quite a bit. There was a sense of actual relief, in my opinion. I don't think they had slept much, and I think they realized that the time had come that basically they were going to be captured and they were going to have to face justice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHO: Certainly an interesting take on things from somebody who knows.

Authorities also recovered weapons in the Hyattes' motel room, but we should mention that they are not saying yet whether it is the murder weapon that Jennifer Hyatte allegedly used to kill a corrections officer during that Tuesday escape. We can tell you that the Hyattes, both George and Jennifer, will be extradited to Tennessee in short order, Soledad, to face first-degree murder charges.

O'BRIEN: Alina Cho with our update this morning. Alina, thanks.

The fast-moving investigation was coordinated near the scene of the crime in Kingston, Tennessee. That's where Bob Franken is, live outside the command post there.

Bob, good morning to you. When do we expect the Hyattes are going to be back in Tennessee?

BOB FRANKEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, officials are a little closed-mouthed about that, except to stay that it could come as early as sometime later today, at least in the case of George Hyatte. It could take a little bit longer in the case of his wife, because she was wounded, is still in the hospital at last word.

You can be sure that when this occurs, the security here is going to be exceedingly heavy, considering the fact that some questions about security are involved in the escape and the tragedy that occurred in the first place.

Now, the people from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation were coordinating here at a command center. By the way, it's no longer here. They were trying to track down and did track down with the help of law enforcement authorities an Odyssey that went from here, 390 miles north to Columbus, Ohio, before the quick capture. There was a spirit of celebration when that happened last night, and also a spirit of relief.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK GWYN, TENNESSEE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION: Based on the violent act that they perpetrated in Kingston, Tennessee, we really felt like that, you know, we didn't want anyone else hurt. We felt like there was a high probability someone else could be hurt. But we're just thankful that it ended the way it did.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FRANKEN: There are some lingering questions, significant questions, Soledad. The largest one being, were there accomplices? Many of the investigators believe that's highly likely. So this investigation has a long way to go -- Soledad.

O'BRIEN: All right. Still under way. Bob Franken for us. Bob, thanks.

Let's take a look at some of the other stories that are making headlines this morning with Fredricka Whitfield. She's at the CNN Center.

Hey, Fred. Good morning again.

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Hello again, Soledad.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency resumes debate this hour on what to do about Iran's nuclear program. France, Britain and Germany have submitted a resolution urging the country to suspend all uranium enrichment activities. Iran insists it is not making nuclear weapons.

A British judge has decided against immediate extradition for a suspected terrorist. The U.S. Justice Department says Haroon Rashid Aswat tried to build a terror training camp in Oregon. He's also suspected of having a role in the July 7 bombings in London. The judge ordered him to remain in British custody until next month.

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drug charge. Stone was arrested at a drunk driving checkpoint in May. He apparently had marijuana on him.

The director was not in court on Wednesday. His lawyers entered the plea on his behalf.

And NASA has just decided to scrub the launch of the Mars orbiter today. Liftoff was expected to take place this morning, but it's now being called off. NASA says it will try again tomorrow -- Carol.

COSTELLO: We'll keep our fingers crossed. Thank you, Fredricka.

Before Columbine, there was Jonesboro, a middle school massacre that claimed five lives. Today, one of the teenage shooters involved is being released from prison.

Ed Lavandera is live in Jonesboro, Arkansas, this morning to tell us more.

Ed, what's the reaction there?

ED LAVANDERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's been a very tough reaction from many of the people that live here in Jonesboro. But in many ways, this is a day shrouded in mystery.

All we know for sure is that, by law, Mitchell Johnson has to be released today, his 21st birthday. But because everything surrounding him and his case is still a secret and must be kept quiet, we can't tell you for sure if he's already been released or when he'll be released today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LAVANDERA (voice-over): Seven years after a schoolyard ambush killed four students and a teacher in Jonesboro, Arkansas, one of the two killers, Mitchell Johnson, will go free today on his 21st birthday. The shooting happened on March 24, 1998. Johnson, then 13, and 11-year-old Andrew Golden opened fire on teachers and classmates outside the West Side Middle School in Jonesboro.

MITCH WRIGHT, WIFE KILLED IN SHOOTING: You look at the number of deaths and the number of people shot, and it's just not right.

LAVANDERA: The shooting came amid a series of deadly attacks in which teenagers targeted their classmates. It was a year before Columbine, the worst school shooting in U.S. history. Just months after Pearl, Mississippi, and Paducah, Kentucky. In the Jonesboro shooting, Mitchell Johnson was tried and convicted as a minor. But because of a since closed loophole in Arkansas's justice system, the state couldn't hold Johnson beyond his 18th birthday. But federal prosecutors were able to use gun charges to keep him locked up until now.

Today, as Johnson turns 21, he will be released from a federal detention center in Memphis, Tennessee. His record will be expunged. The slate clean. That's something some victims' families say they'll never accept.

BRADNI VARNER, SISTER OF SHOOTING VICTIM: Now to know that her killer, the person who put her where she is today, is going to walk free and live a life that she should have lived, you know, tell me how to get over that.

(END VIDEOTAPE) LAVANDERA: Mitchell Johnson's mother told an Arkansas newspaper recently that her son does not plan on ever moving back here to Arkansas and wants to become a minister -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Talk about the record being expunged. This is a kid who stole a gun and then fired off so many shots. Four people died, 10 people were wounded. Under Arkansas law, does that mean he can go out legally and get his hands on a gun again?

LAVANDERA: Well, it's no longer the case. But when these murders happened here at this middle school, it was the case.

His record is completely clean today. His record will look just as any other upstanding citizen in this country. He will never have to tell anyone about this appearing on his record at any time.

COSTELLO: Ed Lavandera, live in Arkansas this morning.

O'BRIEN: Several wildfires are causing major problems in Montana. High winds pushed one fire west of Missoula, across several miles of forest. Firefighters had to retreat because the threat was too great. And not all those firefighters are accounted for this morning. The fire also forced a major power line to be shut down. So far, 10 fires in the state have burned about 15,000 acres.

That brings us right to Chad. He's got the very latest forecast for us.

(WEATHER REPORT)

COSTELLO: Still to come, a chilling new videotape shows the photo I.D. of a Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan. Is it the work of al Qaeda?

O'BRIEN: Plus, the dilemma of brining democracy to Iraq. Could half the population end up with less freedom in the new Iraq than under Saddam Hussein?

That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: A purported al Qaeda video appears to show the photo I.D. of a Navy SEAL killed in late June in eastern Afghanistan. The tape first aired on an Arab news network, and it comes amid escalating violence against U.S. and Afghan forces.

CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen is in our Washington bureau to help us understand this.

Good morning, Peter.

PETER BERGEN, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Good morning, Carol.

COSTELLO: On the video it clearly shows the photo I.D. of a Navy SEAL. It shows what apparently is his gun. It also shows a computer that could have been used by him.

What do you make of this?

BERGEN: I mean, I think the thing speaks for itself. They clearly -- this I.D., the Pentagon has confirmed that is the I.D. of the -- the Navy SEAL who was killed.

There's other material on the tape that's interesting. It appears to have been shot in the northwest frontier province of both Pakistan, or just over the border in Afghanistan. The Navy SEAL was killed in an area called Qunar (ph).

Here we have one of the people on the tape. He's speaking in French, apparently, at one point.

The kind of -- the kind of geography you see on this tape is very much on that Afghan-Pakistan border. And, you know, we're not authenticating it as an al Qaeda videotape, but in my judgment it appears to be one. There appear to be Arabs in the tape, there is some Arabic language.

COSTELLO: Well, you know, the other thing, Peter, not only do they speak French and Arabic, but they speak in English as well.

BERGEN: Yes.

COSTELLO: So where is this being marketed? Is that a marketing ploy?

BERGEN: You know, it's -- clearly it's a propaganda video and it's intended to sort of celebrate the fact that they've killed an American, to show that they're still in business, that they're actually doing classroom instruction about bomb-making, you know, firing off RPGs, as we see in this -- rocket-propelled grenades -- as we see in this shot.

So, you know, al Qaeda has long had a propaganda dimension. They set up a video production unit called The Clouds (ph) as early as early 2001. And this is one of a succession of tapes.

This is quite a well-produced tape. It was -- it's, you know, to superimpose the Arabic subtitles. That's not something that you can kind of do.

COSTELLO: And they pixelated some of the faces on there. And that's kind of amazing technology to get a hold of.

BERGEN: Right, yes. I -- it's the sort of thing obviously we can do in a control room at CNN. I think that, you know, with some -- some kind of readily off-the-shelf kind of software, you probably could do that on your own computer. But it's not something that you can just get together in the middle of a tape.

So clearly, there is some kind of infrastructure behind this. And the film is basically reasonably well-produced. It...

COSTELLO: Well...

BERGEN: Go ahead.

COSTELLO: ... let me ask you about this, too, that is was mostly made in Afghanistan and supposedly put out by al Qaeda. Does that surprise you?

BERGEN: Not really. I mean, we've had -- Carol, and you probably recall this. We've had Ayman al-Zawahiri recently coming out with a videotape. We've had something like 30 statements from bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Many of them on videotape since 2001.

So this is just one of a series. This is a little bit more, you see more people in this. It's -- I counted maybe 20 people in total on the -- on the tape. It's...

COSTELLO: I guess I would have suspected the Taliban to be more involved in this type of video, as it applies to Afghanistan, than al Qaeda.

BERGEN: Well, we don't -- we don't know if it was made in Pakistan or Afghanistan. It was made on the border, I'm pretty sure.

Yes, these people that don't appear to be Taliban. A lot of them look Arab. There is Arabic, you know, subtitles.

We haven't really had a history of the Taliban making these kinds of videotapes. And on the other hand, we have had a history of al Qaeda making these videotapes. So, to me, it seems much more likely to come from al Qaeda rather than the Taliban.

COSTELLO: CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen in Washington.

Thanks so much.

BERGEN: Thank you.

O'BRIEN: Still to come on AMERICAN MORNING, a scientific breakthrough. If you ever wondered what's going on inside your baby's brain, a new study finds some surprising results, especially when it comes to emotions. We'll explain up next on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Do you ever look at your baby and think, what's going on in there? That is the subject, in fact, of "Newsweek's" magazine cover story this week. It's called "Your Baby's Brain: From Jealousy to Joy, How Science is Unlocking the inner lives of infants."

Pat Wingert is one of the authors of the report. She joins us from Washington.

The inner lives of infants? Who knew infants had inner lives beyond, Pat, crying, being hungry, a lot of pooping? That pretty much summed it up for me. But you say actually there's a lot going on in their heads, isn't there? PAT WINGERT, "NEWSWEEK": It's surprising how much is going on. And I think you're right, all of us have wondered when we've looked into our baby's eyes how much they're feeling and if we're seeing things that are really there.

You know, in the '90s, with the decade of the brain, and we did all this brain research, and a lot of it was directed at infants -- and in the last couple of years there's been even more research that has shown us some of the emotions that babies have much earlier than we thought.

O'BRIEN: How early are you talking about? Because I know in this cover story you talk about jealousy. You talk about feeling frustrated.

I mean, at what age are we taking about, a 10-month-old? Older?

WINGERT: Well, no. Really young.

I mean, some emotions are there from the very beginning. Like distress and contentment are there in newborns. But one of the surprises, one of the new surprises was that jealousy is there as early as 4 months. I mean, if you have -- if you bring a new baby home and you have a toddler at home, you've seen jealousy in action.

O'BRIEN: Right.

WINGERT: But most of us don't see it in 4-month-olds. And in this particular case, there's a researcher at Texas Tech by the name of Cybil Hart (ph), and she discovered this -- or got inspired to do this research when she was an at-home mom with a masters degree. And she had gone to a family celebration, there was a new baby in the family. She put her 6-month-old down next to the bassinet, picks up the newborn, and her little baby Natalie starts screaming.

So she puts the newborn down and realizes Natalie stopped screaming. And the scientists in her repeats this several times. And every time she picks up the baby, her little 6-month-old starts screaming. And she realizes, oh, my gosh, my baby is jealous. So then she did it in a very -- she became a Ph.D. and started doing years of research on this, and she has found that babies as young as 4 months will scream and carry on and do everything they can to get their mother's attention if they are holding newborn babies.

O'BRIEN: Not just generally, but because they're jealous.

WINGERT: Right.

O'BRIEN: Let's talk about some other research that you write about which I think is fascinating, this one. The researchers found that babies will cry in empathy with other babies, but they won't cry if they're listening to the sound taped of their own cry.

WINGERT: Right. Right. If you talk to nurses who work in newborn nurseries, they'll tell you that if a baby starts crying, they all start crying. And researchers have wondered for a long time, well, is that just because the noise wakes them up, or is there some empathy there right from the beginning?

And so there's been a series of different studies that have been trying to tease this out. The study that we talk about in the magazine was recently done in Italy. And there, they taped babies' cries, other babies' cries, and then they taped the baby's cry of each individual baby. And those babies would squawk and cry and get all upset when they heard other babies cry, but when they heard a tape of their own voice crying, they didn't react.

O'BRIEN: What about babies' ability to recognize their mothers? There's a study that you write about where the babies can recognize the facial features of their mothers, even when nose is on the mouth, the eyes are down on the nose, and it's all mixed up and scrambled, up to a certain point.

WINGERT: Right. I thought that was one of the most fascinating studies.

Babies younger than 3 months learn our faces by memorizing the individual components. So when they're looking at your face, they're looking at your eyes, they memorize your nose, your mouth, and they don't realize that it kind of always comes in the same arrangement.

So it you're looking over your baby's crib and your face is upside down, it's as recognizable to them as it would be right side up. And even if you took a picture of yourself and kind of scrambled it around, and put your eyes where your nose were, your babies would still be able to recognize you.

O'BRIEN: How long can they do that until?

WINGERT: Just until about 3 months. And then after that they realize that our faces are always in the same arrangement.

O'BRIEN: Oh, that's great. Pat Wingert. It's the cover story in "Newsweek," and it's a terrific story.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

WINGERT: Thanks. It was fun being here.

COSTELLO: That is so cool.

Still to come, are the Rolling Stones still throwing stones at President Bush? Mick Jagger and Keith Richards talk about the controversy over their new song.

That's just ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Good morning. Welcome back, everybody. It is just about half past the hour on this AMERICAN MORNING. I'm Soledad O'Brien.

COSTELLO: And I'm Carol Costello, in for Miles today. Coming up, the Rolling Stones. After all of these years, they're still going.

O'BRIEN: Strong.

COSTELLO: They are.

A new album, concert tour, and controversy. We'll hear from Mick Jagger as he defends a controversial new song.

O'BRIEN: Isn't his defense sort of, "I don't know what you're talking about?"

COSTELLO: It's wimpy.

O'BRIEN: It's not, "I didn't write that." It's an interesting story, though.

First, though, a look at the other stories making headlines with Fredricka Whitfield. She's at the CNN Center this morning.

Good morning.

WHITFIELD: Thank you, ladies. Good morning again.

Well, two fugitives wanted in connection with the shooting death of a Tennessee prison guard are expected to face first-degree murder charges. George and Jennifer Hyatte were captured without incident last night in a motel room in Columbus, Ohio. They'll both be extradited to Tennessee after hearings in Ohio.

Later today, we're expecting to hear from the cab driver who tipped off authorities about the couples' whereabouts. And that's this hour.

President Bush conducting business as usual during this working vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. Today the president is meeting with his top advisers to discuss several issues, including the situation in Iraq. On Wednesday, the president signed a massive transportation bill in Illinois.

And Tropical Storm Irene could become a hurricane. Irene is now south of Bermuda, packing winds of about 45 miles per hour. It had been downgraded to a tropical depression earlier this week, but then regained strength overnight. We'll check its path with Chad coming up.

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