Child rescued, father arrested after hourslong SWAT situation

ATLANTA — Several children are recovering after they say their father beat them with a baseball bat. The attack led to an intense police standoff near a northwest Atlanta school.

Police arrested the father just before noon, after rescuing a fourth child from the home along Griffin Street NW.

That father ended up holed up inside the home, leading police in a SWAT standoff for nearly five hours. The standoff put Hollis Innovation Academy on lockdown.

Police say this all started around 6:30 a.m. Monday morning. The man’s three other children ran to a neighbor’s house and told police their dad assaulted them with a baseball bat.

They were taken to Grady Memorial Hospital for lacerations on their head.

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The children also told police their father was still inside the home with one of their siblings, and possibly armed with a gun.

Victoria Parks told Channel 2’s Kristen Holloway that she was dropping her child off at Hollis Innovation Academy this morning as the standoff was going on.

“The first thing they did this morning, an officer went up to the school and he made sure all the kids standing in the front got in the school,” Parks said.

Holloway said she heard SWAT officers yell “James Tidwell” several times while trying to make contact with him after he barricaded both the front and side door of the house.

Parks said Tidwell was her son’s baseball coach and she was shocked because Tidwell was always with his kids.

“At the park all the time with the kids, go to the store with the kids. It’s always him and kids, so I don’t understand what happened,” Parks said. “This is hard. Hard to believe something but you see something totally different.”

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