A gunman who opened fire at a security checkpoint into the Pentagon on Thursday, injuring two officers before he was fatally wounded, is believed to be a former San Jose State University student from Hollister.
The shooter, identified as John Patrick Bedell, 36, died hours after being admitted to a hospital in critical condition, authorities said.
A man who identified himself Thursday night as John Bedell answered a call placed to a Hollister home and said he had a 36-year-old son named John Patrick Bedell “who is in the Washington area” before saying, “I’m sorry I can’t talk about this,” and hanging up.
The Hollister Free Lance newspaper reported that local sources confirmed Bedell was the son of Kaye Bedell, the director of allied health at Gavilan College and his father was John Bedell Sr., a local financial planner.
Neighbors said Bedell Sr. had a grown son who used to live with him at the Ridgemark Golf and Country Club, where the family still lives.
SJSU spokeswoman Pat Lopes Harris said a man with that name had previously enrolled in the university’s graduate electrical engineering program but was not currently a student.
David Parent, a professor at SJSU, said he had a John Bedell in his classroom one semester a few years ago.
“I couldn’t imagine a more gentle person,” said Parent, who had not heard of the shooting. “Nothing I ever saw triggered a hint of anything like this. I can’t believe it.”
Parent said he mostly spoke about circuit design with Bedell, and that Bedell had even set up a Web site so people could learn more about circuit design. “He was a very helpful person.”
During the shooting, the two officers suffered grazing wounds and were being treated in a hospital, said Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police. Authorities had no motive for the shooting. There were signs, however, that Bedell may have harbored resentment for the military and had doubts about the facts behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover-up.
The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”
The shooter walked up to the checkpoint at the Pentagon’s subway entrance in an apparent attempt to get inside the massively fortified Defense Department headquarters.
“He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting” no more than five feet away, Keevill said. “He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.” The Pentagon officers returned fire with semi-automatic weapons.
“We have layers of security and it worked. He never got inside the building to hurt anyone,” Keevill said.
UPDATE: March 5, 2010:
The Pentagon shooter had been behaving erratically, and his family feared in January that he had bought a gun, a law enforcement official said Friday.
San Benito County Sheriff Curtis Hill told reporters that the parents of John Patrick Bedell filed a missing persons report and were worried about his mental stability. After reading an e-mail from their son to an acquaintance, the parents told deputies they were worried that he had purchased a gun.
Hill said that Bedell has been on the department’s radar since 2003, when deputies found him walking along the side of the road. They wrote him up as a “5150″ — police code for crazy — and took him to his parents house.
Hill said that Bedell, 36, has been at in-patient mental health institutions at least four times.
The parents reported Bedell missing on Jan. 4, one day after a Texas Highway Patrol officer stopped him for speeding in Amarillo, according to the missing person’s report. Bedell told the highway patrolman he was heading for the East Coast, and the officer used Bedell’s phones to call his mother, Kaye Bedell, because he seemed disheveled and out of sorts.
Kaye Bedell told the highway patrol officer in Texas that her son was fine, and the patrolman let him go with a warning. The next day, Kaye told sheriff’s deputies in California that her son didn’t have any reason to travel to the East Coast because he had no friends or family there and they were worried about his mental state.
The 36-year-old Bedell returned to his parent’s home on January 18, telling them “not to ask any questions” about where he had been.
His father told deputies his son then left. They did not know where he had gone.
“This is, you know, Middle America,” Hill said. “These parents are good folks.”
Sometime afterward, Bedell drove cross-country and arrived outside the military headquarters armed with two semi-automatic weapons, authorities said Friday. Internet postings linked to the lone shooting suspect reflect long-held anti-government anger.
Bedell pulled a handgun at a Pentagon entrance, shot two police officers and was mortally wounded in an exchange of gunfire, authorities said. The two officers were hospitalized briefly with minor injuries.
A blog connected to Bedell via the social networking site LinkedIn outlines his growing distrust of the federal government. It gives credence to the idea that a criminal enterprise run out of the government could have staged the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
It was one of several conspiracy-laden Internet postings linked to Bedell to surface since Thursday night’s shooting.
Authorities said Bedell had previous run-ins with the law. They found no known connection to terrorist groups or ideologies, investigators said.
The family put out a statement Friday saying they were “devastated as a family by the news from yesterday.”
“We may never know why he made this terrible decision,” it said. “One thing is clear though – his actions were caused by an illness and not a defective character.”
Investigators were still trying to determine a motive for the brazen shooting and began trying to unravel a bizarre series of Internet postings that suggested Bedell was fascinated with conspiracy theories, computer programming, libertarian economics and the science of warfare.
Curiously, Bedell also proposed in 2004 that the Pentagon fund his own research on smart weapons. The 28-page proposal outlined his idea for DNA nanotechnology research that might “provide significant new capabilities for the Department of Defense and the individual warfighter.”
That document is the first tangible link to surface connecting Bedell and the Pentagon.
On the day of the attack, Bedell left his car – a green, 12-year-old Toyota – in a nearby mall parking garage.
The six-foot tall, blue-eyed software devotee approached the Pentagon entrance Thursday evening wearing a jacket, dress shirt and pants, seeming like any other end-of-the-day commuter.
Law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity described what happened next as a chaotic, fast-paced confrontation in which so many bullets were flying from four different guns that even a day later investigators are still trying to determine exactly whose rounds went where.
Bedell, the officials say, opened fire with a 9 millimeter handgun just five feet from the nearest officer, Marvin Carraway. Fellow officer Jeffrey Amos ran out of a nearby guard booth to confront Bedell, as did a third, unidentified officer. All three officers gave chase and fire at Bedell, who was struck in the head and left arm.
Washoe County Sheriff Mike Haley said Bedell was arrested in Reno on Feb. 1 after a deputy stopped him in a green Toyota sedan on the south end of town and found 2 ounces of marijuana but no weapons.
Haley told reporters in Reno on Friday that Bedell believed “the currency of the United States should be marijuana.”
The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon – the U.S. capital’s ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 – came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post allegedly by a U.S. Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings.
Hatred of the government motivated a man in Texas last month to fly a small plane into a building housing Internal Revenue Service offices, killing an IRS employee and himself.
The shooting resembled one in January in which a gunman walked up to the security entrance of a Las Vegas courthouse and opened fire with a shotgun, killing one officer and wounding another before being gunned down in return fire.
