WASHINGTON – A California man killed in a shootout with Pentagon
police drove cross-country and arrived at the military
headquarters' subway entrance armed with two semiautomatic weapons,
authorities said Friday. The shooter apparently left behind
Internet postings resentful of the government and airing suspicions
about the 9/11 attacks.
John
Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was named as the
gunman in the Thursday evening attack. Authorities said he'd had
previous run-ins with the law.
Investigators have found no immediate connection to terrorism,
and the attack that superficially wounded two police officers at
the massive Defense Department headquarters appears to be a case of
"a single individual who had issues," Richard Keevill, chief of
Pentagon police, said in an early morning press conference
Friday.
Keevill described Bedell as "very well-educated" and
well-dressed, saying Bedell was wearing a suit when he showed up at
the secure Pentagon entrance about 6:40 p.m. and blended in with
workers. He was concealing two 9
millimeter semiautomatic weapons and "many magazines" of
ammunition.
When Bedell seemed to reach into his pocket for worker
identification, he instead pulled out a gun, Keevill said.
"He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started
shooting" at point-blank range, Keevill said. "He walked up
very cool. He had no real emotion on his face."
Bedell died Thursday night from head wounds received when the
two injured officers and another officer returned fire, Keevill
said.
The exchange of fire at the subway entrance in Arlington, Va., lasted
less than a minute but numerous shots were fired, Keevill said,
adding that investigators were "still counting." Bedell was not
wearing body
armor, he added.
The two officers injured have been released from the hospital.
One suffered a thigh wound and the other was hit in the shoulder.
Keevill said both were superficial injuries.
Keevill said he did not know what motivated the shooting: "I
have no idea what his intentions were."
There was more ammunition in Bedell's car, which authorities
found in a local parking garage.
"He came here from California,"
Keevill said. "We were able to identify certain locations that he
spent that last several weeks making his way from the West coast to
the East coast."
Signs emerged that Bedell harbored ill feelings toward the
government and the armed forces, and had questioned the
circumstances 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. Sabow's
family has maintained that he was murdered because he was about to
expose covert military operations in Central America involving
drug
smuggling.
Keevill said Friday that authorities had not made "a final
determination" that the shooter was the same Bedell.
The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was "a step
toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11
demolitions."
That same posting railed against the government's enforcement of
marijuana laws and included links to the author's 2006 court case
in Orange County,
Calif., involving allegations of cultivating marijuana and
resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the
date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell
matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the
shooting.
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 a barrage of return fire.
President Barack Obama was getting FBI updates on the Pentagon
shooting through his homeland
security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan,
White House
spokesman Nick Shapiro said.
The subway station is immediately adjacent to the Pentagon
building, a five-sided northern Virginia colossus across the
Potomac River
from Washington. Since a redesign following the 2001
terrorist attack on the Pentagon, riders can no longer
disembark directly into the building. Riders take a long escalator
ride to the surface from the underground station, then pass through
a security check outside the doors of the building, where further
security awaits.
Transit officials said the subway station would remain closed at
least part of the day Friday while the FBI
continued its investigation.
Keevill said the gunman gave no clue to the officers at the
checkpoint about what he was going to do.
"There was no distress," he said. "When he reached into his
pocket, they assumed he was going to get a pass and he came up with
a gun."
"He wasn't pretending to be anyone. He was wearing a coat and
walked up and just started shooting."
Keevill added: "We have layers of security and it worked. He
never got inside the building to hurt anyone."
Ronald Domingues, 74, who lives next door to Bedell's parents in a
gated golf course community in Hollister, said he doesn't know the
family well. But he said Bedell sometimes lived with his parents
and struck him "like a normal young man."
"He just seemed like a normal guy to me," Domingues said. "I
wouldn't suspect he would be involved in anything like this."
Domingues described the neighborhood as middle-class. He said
the Bedells live in a one story southwestern-style stucco home. The
house was dark Thursday night.
___
Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Christine Simmons,
Pauline Jelinek, Anne Gearan, Mike Gracia, Nafeesa Syeed, Philip
Elliott and Kasey Jones contributed to this report.
