NBC, msnbc.com and news services | updated 11:02 a.m. ET March 5, 2010
Internet postings linked to the suspected gunman in a Pentagon subway shooting suggest long-held frustration with the government's reach into the private life of Americans.
The suspect, John Patrick Bedell, 36, died after exchanging gunfire with two police officers (picture). He spent weeks driving to the Capital area from the West Coast, authorities said Friday.
A blog connected to him via the social networking site LinkedIn outlines a growing distrust of the federal government. The blog suggests a criminal enterprise run out of the government could have staged the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
It was the latest batch of conspiracy-laden Internet postings to surface since Thursday night's shooting.
'Hostile intent'
Bedell died Thursday night from head wounds received in a volley of fire with police. Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police, said the two injured officers and another officer who came to their assistance fired upon Bedell at the subway entrance into the Pentagon building in Arlington, Va.
"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."
Keevill described Bedell as "very well educated" and well-dressed, saying Bedell was wearing a suit, armed with two 9 millimeter semiautomatic weapons and carried "many magazines" of ammunition. There was more ammunition in Bedell's car, which authorities found in a local parking garage, Keevill said.
Noting that Bedell was wearing a suit, Keevill said: "There was no indication based on the way he was dressed that he had hostile intent."
"He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting" at point-blank range. He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face," Keevill said.
The exchange of fire lasted less than a minute but, numerous shots were fired, Keevill said, adding that he didn't know how many because 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.
Signs emerge
Beverly Fields, chief of staff of the D.C. medical examiner's office, confirmed the man's death and said his body arrived at her office shortly after midnight.
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.
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., for 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.
A man who identified himself as Bedell's father told KNX Newsradio in Los Angeles that his son was a grad student at San Jose State University.
Driven by hate
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.
Whatever the motive of Thursday's attack, the method 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.
After the attack, all Pentagon entrances were secured, then all were reopened except one from the subway, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.
Transit officials said the station would remain closed at least part of the day Friday while the FBI continued its investigation.
'Normal guy'
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.
