Kidnaped Boy Negotiates Release : Abduction: Nine-year-old dragged away from schoolyard serves as intermediary between captor and police. His key suggestion helps win his freedom.

A 9-year-old boy was grabbed from an Orange County school playground by a woman with a gun and held hostage for about 20 minutes Wednesday before he calmly negotiated his own release, authorities said.

Police arrested Sheila Faye Reed, 30, of Yorba Linda, who had walked onto the campus of Van Buren Elementary School in Placentia and grabbed the youngster as he played catch with a friend.

School officials quickly moved the other children to another part of the school, while police negotiators tried to talk the woman into freeing the boy. But finally, it was the words of young David Christie that brought the drama to a close, investigators said.

“I told her at the end if she would let me go I’d tell the police to put down his weapon, and so she did,” Christie said in an interview at his home several hours after the incident. “I did it because I just didn’t want to be there. I wanted to get out.”

The officer put down his gun and David ran into the arms of police, said Placentia police Lt. Daryll Thomann. The boy’s composure, he said, helped keep the situation from turning into a tragedy.

“The boy was pretty cool throughout the whole ordeal,” Thomann said. “He was the negotiator.”

Reed, who works part-time at Disneyland, was booked on suspicion of kidnaping and was being held at Orange County Jail, police said.

The woman abducted Christie about 12:15 p.m., just as the lunch period was ending, Principal Kenneth Lorge said.

Christie and a friend were tossing a baseball back and forth on their way back to class when “the lady grabbed me by the hand,” the boy recounted.

“She said, ‘We’re gonna go home now,’ and I said, ‘No, no, no,’ but I didn’t scream,” Christie said.

Reed dragged the third-grader to a bench at Carlsbad Park, which abuts the school. A school supervisor spotted them and asked the woman what she was doing. Someone ran to tell the principal, and someone else called police.

Reed communicated with police through the boy, Thomann said, having him yell information to the officers instead of talking to them directly.

“She told one policeman, ‘Put down your weapon and come here,’ ” Christie said. “And the police said, ‘We’re not allowed to do that.’ ”

That’s when Christie said it dawned on him to suggest a swap--his safe return if the officer put his gun down. And Reed went for it.

Fifteen minutes later, Thomann said, police talked her into throwing down her weapon. She tried to flee, he said, but officers tackled and handcuffed her.

“I asked her why she took me and she said because she needed help for something,” Christie said. “She didn’t say for what.”

Times correspondent Tom McQueeney contributed to this story.