ATLANTA — A South Carolina man led the authorities on Tuesday to the bodies of his five children in rural Alabama, ending a six-day search that had stretched across the South, law enforcement officials said.Sheriff Earnest I. Evans of Wilcox County, Ala., said that investigators had recovered the bodies of the children, all 1 to 8 years old, in a rural area near Camden, more than an hour southwest of Montgomery.The sheriff’s department in Lexington County, S.C., where the children were reported missing by their mother on Sept. 3, identified the father as Timothy Ray Jones Jr. A department spokesman said Mr. Jones, 32, would be charged initially with unlawful neglect of a child by a legal custodian, though officials expected to file additional charges.Sheriff Evans said investigators had begun an intense search in his county early Tuesday after Mississippi officials, who had found blood and bleach when they detained the father on Saturday at a motor vehicle checkpoint in Smith County, contacted them with information about the children. “The investigators called me last night and told me what the suspect had said: that he had dropped those kids off in a rural area in Wilcox County or Butler County,” Sheriff Evans said in a telephone interview.But investigators were at first unable to find the children, and the Mississippi authorities soon took the father, who had been arrested at the Smith County checkpoint on drunken driving and drug charges, toAlabama to help locate them.“He showed us pretty much where it was,” said Sheriff Evans, who added that officials were still processing the scene, at least 200 yards off a highway, on Tuesday night and were awaiting forensics specialists. A South Carolina coroner was preparing to transport the bodies to Lexington County.Sheriff Charlie Crumpton of Smith County, where Mr. Jones was being held on Tuesday night, said in a statement that the bodies had been decomposing in individual garbage bags when they were found.Earlier, Sheriff Crumpton told The Clarion Ledger, in Jackson, Miss., that he could not “imagine what goes through a man’s head when he does this; it was a horrible, horrible crime.”The Lexington County sheriff’s department said in a statement that Mr. Jones had joint custody of the children after a divorce and that his former wife had sometimes “been unable to contact her ex-husband.”He had told neighbors, the department said, that he planned to move with the children to a different state.The disappearance of the children set off a search that included the F.B.I., and Sheriff Evans said officials had determined that Mr. Jones withdrew money from an Alabama bank on Saturday morning.Sheriff Evans said the discovery of the bodies was deeply unsettling inhis impoverished county of 11,300, where months often pass without homicides.“This is our first time ever having anything like this here in Wilcox County,” he said. “It’s almost unheard-of here.”RHETORICAL ANALYSISThe purpose of this article is to inform the audience of the tragedy that has happened in Alabama. I chose this article from the NY Times because the man is from Lexington County, South Carolina and that’s what county I live in. The man is accused of killing his 5 children in SC and then driving their dead bodies into AL and burying the bodies there. The article writer uses ethos and pathos to convey his purpose to his audience. In this article, ethos is used by quoting several different qualified, trustworthy people to tell the story. The writer quotes the Lexington County sheriff as well as the Sheriff of Wilcox County in Alabama. If a reader were looking for credible information on a homicide case, the most logical place to start would be with the Sheriff of the county in which the crime happened. The writer quotes the right sources in order to increase the reliability of the article. In addition to the ethos logic, the writer also throws in some pathos in order to make the writer sympathize with the situation and to feel emotionally connected to the subject matter. The writer has the sheriff give his opinion of the whole incident. The sheriff’s statement is one that most people are expected to feel. The audience can relate with what the sheriff is feeling and this ties in the ethos side of the writer’s argument. The article is not extremely over run with logics just because it is not an opinion-based article but a fact based piece of writing. The writer cannot express his emotions or view point of the