Pentagon Gunman Dies; Mystery of Assault Deepens

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Pentagon Gunman Dies; Mystery of Assault Deepens
Published on 03-05-2010 Email To Friend Print Version


Source: Wall Street Journal

The sole suspect in Thursday's Pentagon shooting died from the wounds he received in gunfire exchange with police, deepening the mystery surrounding the failed assault on the Defense Department's sprawling headquarters.

At a morning news conference, Pentagon Police Chief Richard Keevill said that the alleged gunman, John Patrick Bedell, had been carrying two 9-mm semiautomatic pistols and several magazines of ammunition. More ammunition was found in Mr. Bedell's car, Chief Keevill said.

Pentagon officials said that Mr. Bedell, 36 years old, appeared to have acted alone and that authorities were expanding their investigation into what may have prompted him to open fire on Pentagon police officers Thursday evening. Web postings linked to Mr. Bedell reflected antigovernment sentiment.

There is no indication at this point that there is any domestic or international terrorist connection, Chief Keevill said.

Concerns about the safety of U.S. military installations have been running high since a shooting at Fort Hood in Texas last November killed 13 troops and an earlier incident outside a Little Rock, Ark., recruiting station killed one soldier and badly wounded another. Both of the earlier assaults appear to have been religiously motivated.

Law enforcement officials provided new details Friday about the shootings. In a joint statement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pentagon Force Protection Agency said that Mr. Bedell appeared to have driven from his home in Hollister, Calif., in the days before the assault. Mr. Bedell's 1998 green Toyota Avalon was recovered from a garage at the Pentagon City Mall hours after the shootings.

The two agencies said the incident began when Mr. Bedell, who had a full beard, emerged from the Pentagon subway station Thursday evening and made his way to a nearby guard post. When the officers asked for his identification, Mr. Bedell, who was wearing in a white button-down shirt and a blazer, pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and started shooting.

Pentagon police officers Jeffery Amos and Marvin Carraway shot back, hitting Mr. Bedell in the head and tricep. The alleged gunman was evacuated to George Washington University Hospital in downtown Washington, and was pronounced dead at approximately 10 p.m.Thursday.

Messrs. Amos and Carraway were treated at the hospital for minor injuries and released. A third Pentagon officer shot at Mr. Bedell, but authorities declined to release his name.

Chief Keevill said the guards ensured that the gunman couldn't enter the building, which was less than 20 yards away from where the shooting took place. The incident occurred near the subway station, which is used by thousands of military personnel and civilian Pentagon employees every day.

"The officers acted very quickly and decisively to neutralize the threat and no one else was injured," Mr. Keevill said Thursday night.

In the immediate aftermath of Thursday's shooting, Pentagon authorities sealed all of the entrances and exits to the mammoth building, preventing many military and civilian officials from returning home. The closures were lifted after a short period of time. The building was open for normal business on Friday, but Chief Keevill said the Pentagon's subway entrance would remain closed while investigators continue to comb what he described as an extensive crime scene.

In postings on Wikipedia and other Web sites, Mr. Bedell came across as an educated and technologically proficient man with strong libertarian leanings, an anger toward the U.S. government, and a belief that far-reaching conspiracies were behind events as big as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and as small as the disputed 1991 death of a Marine colonel.

Mr. Bedell spent years studying engineering at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Pat Harris, a spokeswoman for San Jose State University in California, said Mr. Bedell took undergraduate courses in chemical engineering in 1995-1996 and then spent 2008-2009 doing graduate work in electrical engineering. She said he was no longer enrolled at the university and hadn't received any degrees from San Jose State.

Mr. Bedell's user page on Wikipedia, which he wrote under the name "JPatrickBedell," said that he was "determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow, as a step towards establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions."

Col. Sabow had been found dead outside his California home in 1991 in what authorities said was a suicide, but his family and friends have long argued that he was killed to cover up government-sanctioned drug smuggling and secret military operations in Central America.

Mr. Bedell gave a detailed explanation of his world view in a Nov. 25, 2006, podcast called "Directions to Freedom, Part Two." He said the "seizure of the United States government by an international criminal conspiracy" was a "long-established reality." Those shadowy forces used the powers of the federal government to safeguard the shipments of their own drugs into the U.S. while crushing their would-be rivals, issued trillions of dollars of new debt to expand their wealth, and launched "political and military" disasters like Vietnam and Iraq to divert attention from their true activities, he said.

Mr. Bedell criticized the military and the nation's intelligence services, which he said had become tools of an oppressive, illegitimate regime. "This criminal organization would use its powers to convert military, intelligence, and law enforcement bureaucracies into instruments for political control and the domination and subjection of society, while discrediting, destroying, and murdering honest individuals within those services that work to root out corruption and faithfully serve their fellow citizens," Mr. Bedell said. "This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control."

In his writings, Mr. Bedell also railed against U.S. drug laws, particularly the prohibition on marijuana cultivation.

"My desire for justice led me to violate what I think is one of the most unjust laws, cannabis prohibition, by growing 16 cannabis plants on my balcony," he wrote on the Wikipedia page.

Mr. Bedell's page on Cannabis Wiki, a user-generated Web site, includes digital copies of the court records from his June 2006 arrest in Orange County, Calif. According to the records, Mr. Bedell was charged with illegally cultivating and harvesting 16 four-foot-high marijuana plants, as well resisting a police officer. An official at the court confirmed that the records were authentic.

Mr. Bedell's ambitions went beyond seeing marijuana legalized. On his Wikipedia user page, he wrote of his hopes of seeing "billions and billions of carefully cultivated, highly valuable cannibis plants growing through the United States with complete security of property." He envisioned the plants being used as a part of a new monetary system tied to the value of a gram of cannabis.