Peoria Welcomes Its Ransomed Son : Abduction: The city that raised funds to pay Colombian guerrillas greets him in the matter-of-fact way it helped obtain his release.

Independence Day came a bit early to Peoria this year.

The city, which raised the funds to win the release of kidnaped Scott Heimdal, is welcoming him home, in the same neighborly but matter-of-fact way it went about helping win his freedom from Colombian guerrillas.

No parade. No big hero’s welcome. Not a lot of self-congratulation for the way they came to the aid of this native son they hardly knew.

A hundred or so balloon-carrying, sign-waving well-wishers met Heimdal at the airport upon his return to Peoria Monday night, and another hundred or so greeted him outside his parent’s home. But on Tuesday folks hung back and let the Heimdals get reacquainted.

“Just the family is going to celebrate,” said Angie Heimdal, Scott’s sister. “We’re celebrating all week. Thursday is Scott’s birthday.”

Scott Heimdal, 27, an engineer who worked for the IMINCO Gold Mining Co. in Ecuador, was kidnaped April 28 while traveling by canoe on business on a river near the Equadoran-Colombian border. After his arrival in Peoria Monday night he told with an almost casual air how the man piloting the canoe was killed in the ambush. A second passenger was abducted along with Heimdal but later was released with a ransom demand for Heimdal.

His captors wanted $1.2 million for Heimdal’s release. They later lowered the demand to $60,000. Peoria Mayor Jim Maloof asked every household in the metropolitan area--there are nearly 60,000 of them--to contribute at least a dollar, and the community quickly responded.

Nursery home residents held bake sales, children collected money in jars, bar owners staged benefit dances, radio stations gave away concert tickets in exchange for donations to free Scott Heimdal.

The money was raised in a matter of days. In the end, $108,000 was raised for Heimdal’s release, according to some reports. After further negotiations--the kidnapers at one point raised the ransom demand to $600,000--Heimdal was released Friday.

“There aren’t any words to describe the happiness I feel,” said Marge Heimdal, Scott’s mother, upon her return to Peoria Monday night. She and her husband, Roy, flew to Ecuador two weeks ago to personally take charge of the negotiations to get their son released.

“I’m very glad my son is with me, but as I said before I left I wasn’t coming home without him.”

Roy Heimdal remained in Ecuador to clear up banking business and to help secure a visa for Scott’s Ecuadoran girlfriend.

“This is a powerful story,” said Maloof. “It’s a mother and dad who, when the State Department and government officials could not get involved to help, they took it upon themselves. They would not give up. They had great faith, great determination and great love.”

On Saturday, the family will host a “small reception” in a city park to show their appreciation to Peoria. Everyone in the city will be invited.

“It’s kind of an old fashioned way, a simple way, of saying thank you,” said Jim Maloof, Peoria’s mayor and a longtime friend of the Heimdals. “That is far more valuable, to me, than having a big parade and what have you.”

Heimdal said he was kidnaped simply because he is North American.

“I was abducted by the EPL, which is a Colombian guerrilla group,” he said. “The motive for kidnaping me was money to finance the war against the Colombian government. . . . They were looking to kidnap a North American.”

He said he talked his kidnapers, whom he said treated him with “great respect,” into lowering their ransom demands.

“I just told them they (his parents) don’t have that kind of money,” he told reporters. “Very few people in the United States have that kind of money. In Latin America they feel that being an American and being rich are the same thing.”

Heimdal’s family is far from rich. They live in a rented frame house in a middle-class neighborhood. They moved there two years ago after the family had been forced to sell everything they owned to pay bills after they went into debt.

“They just had problem after problem, yet they had the strength and courage to go on,” said Maloof, who has known the family for 20 years. In the early 1980s, during an economic downturn in Peoria in which Roy Heimdal, then a real estate agent, lost his job, the family moved to Wisconsin. While there, Marge Heimdal was twice critically injured in car accidents, one by a drunk driver. Rising medical bills caused the family to go into debt. They returned to Peoria in 1988.

When the family received the ransom demands from her son’s kidnapers, Marge Heimdal went on television to ask for help. “Her appeal on television and in all the media was very dramatic: ‘I want to save my son,’ ” said Maloof. “That triggered a whole lot of action. . . .

“In 1975 we lost a 27-year-old son due to an illness,” Maloof said. “The Heimdal family was as close to me or closer than my own family members during that time of trouble.”

He said he was overjoyed to see that kindness returned. “What a beautiful time to be the mayor of such a giving community,” he said.

After Heimdal’s release from captivity on Friday and before his return to Peoria, Heimdal’s two sisters removed the yellow ribbons they had tied to the trees surrounding the family’s house and replaced them with red, white and blue bunting. More than a dozen small American flags poked from the front lawn to greet Heimdal’s return. A sign stretched across the front door said: “Welcome home Scott.”