"Keeping your sanity and staying positive (and trying, through media messages, to convince terrorists not to behead your kidnapped brother): lessons learned by an anxious family member caught in the middle of an international story".

As Charlotte, N.C., financial consultant Ty Hensley learned firsthand about the brutality of the war in Iraq, he was thrust unwillingly into the national and international media spotlight. Hensley had never been in a headline or on a front page. He had grown up as part of a close-knit southern family, had played T-ball as a youngster (his closest brush with becoming a sports star), had been a faithful member of his Baptist church, and earned his degree in business administration from a respected university. Hensley had progressed through life quietly and steadily--if uneventfully. He had worked hard, married, fathered three children, remarried and kept about his personal business. All that changed in September 2004 when Ty, 36, and his family learned that his older brother Jack Hensley, 48, had been kidnapped in Iraq. An extremist Islamic group led by American-hating militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi demanded that the U.S. government free all Muslim women jailed by the U.S. military in Iraq. The United States had 24 hours to meet the terrorists' demands. If not met, Jack Hensley would be beheaded. His holders had already released a grisly video showing their beheading of American contractor Eugene Armstrong. The video and threats terrified the Hensley family--all the more so since the U.S. government had avowed never to negotiate with terrorists. Ty Hensley thought the national news media could help get the message out that brother Jack had gone to Iraq not as an armed soldier but as a peace-loving American contractor who had befriended many Iraqis and who was committed to helping them rebuild their infrastructure.

How to get that last-chance message out--to everyone, including Jack Hensley's kidnappers? How do you work with and through the local, national and international media to get your desperate message out? What was learned by Hensley, his family, his friends, and by journalists who covered him in trying to communicate and win over, via media messages, extremist, murderous kidnappers?

This research paper will explore these key questions through in-depth interviews with Ty Hensley, Debbie Garrick (his close friend and media consultant throughout the kidnapping ordeal), and Pati Hensley (Jack Hensley's wife). In addition, interviews will be conducted with journalists in the Carolinas and in New York; the content of selected media (covering the Jack Hensley story) will also be examined. Did any of it make a difference? What advice do Ty Hensley and others connected with the Jack Hensley story have for those who might find themselves in the same situation? Our research will explore these questions.