The parents of the Hollister man shot to death after pulling a
gun on Pentagon police guards Thursday had reported him missing in
January and, concerned about his mental health, they asked local
authorities to hold him.
The parents of the Hollister man shot to death after pulling a gun on Pentagon police guards Thursday had reported him missing in January and, concerned about his mental health, they asked local authorities to hold him.
Kaye Bedell, the director of allied health at Gavilan College, and his father John Bedell, Sr., a local financial planner, the parents of John Patrick Bedell, 36, filed a missing-person report Jan. 4, said San Benito County, Calif., Sheriff Curtis Hill.
Hill said the report stemmed from a call the family received from a Texas state trooper Jan. 3. The trooper said he had stopped their son for speeding on a freeway heading west outside Amarillo, Hill said.
The trooper used Bedell’s cell phone to call Bedell’s parents, apparently trying to determine whether there was sufficient cause for a mental-health hold on Bedell.
“There’s an inference in (the report) that he was concerned about his mental health,” Hill said.
It’s unclear what Bedell’s mother told the trooper. Apparently finding no cause to hold Bedell, the trooper let him go, Hill said.
Hill said Bedell’s mother called San Benito County sheriff’s deputies the next day to report her son missing and to ask for a mental health hold in the event he was located. Deputies went to the Bedell house later. By then, his mother said, he had returned home, but she told deputies she couldn’t find him.
The missing-person case remained open until Jan. 18, when deputies returned to the Bedell home. His father told them he had returned and to cancel the missing-person report, which they did, Hill said.
The family released a statement Friday morning that reads: “We are devastated as a family by the news from yesterday. To the outside world, this tragedy is the first and only thing they will know of Patrick. To us, he was a beloved son, brother, grandson, nephew and cousin. We may never know why he made this terrible decision. One thing is clear though – his actions were caused by an illness and not a defective character.
“We wish for the speedy and complete recovery of the two officers involved.
“The family asks that you respect their privacy in this terrible time.”
In 2006, Orange County court records show, Bedell was arrested and charged with cultivating marijuana and resisting arrest. The marijuana charge was later dropped and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of resisting arrest. He served three years’ probation, which ended in August, and for which he did California Department of Transportation community service, according to court records.
San Benito County Courthouse records show that he had no documented, criminal history there.
Bedell had recently attended San Jose State University as a graduate student, studying electrical engineering, said Pat Harris, university spokeswoman. Bedell enrolled in courses in the fall of 2008 through fall of 2009, she said. He had not enrolled for the 2010 spring semester, but “he was a student in good standing.”
Bedell was not on academic probation nor did he have a criminal record at the university, Harris said.
San Benito County Supervisor Reb Monaco said he and his family have been “close” with the Bedells for “30-something years.”
“I am just shocked by it,” said Monaco, who had just heard about the local connection.
The District 4 supervisor said he has known Bedell since the suspected gunman was a “little kid” but he has not had contact with him in the past few years.
Monaco said the last he had heard, Bedell was going to school full time, but that was “several months ago.”
Bedell, apparently planning to enter the Pentagon, walked impassively up to police officers guarding the doors of the massive building and opened fire early Thursday evening, wounding two officers before he was shot and killed.
The gunfight took place just yards from the entrance to the giant defense installation as workers were still heading home for the evening, police said. Workers were ordered back to their offices and the building was locked down for a period of time.
“He walked up, very cool. He had no distress, no emotion in his face,” said Richard S. Keevill, chief of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, the civilian police agency that guards the five-sided building. “When he reached in his pocket, they assumed he was going to get his (building) pass out. He came out with a gun.”
The gunman began firing, hitting the two officers, who then fired back at the shooter. Both officers were taken to George Washington University hospital for treatment of non-life threatening injuries.
Bedell’s apparent online presence revealed a history of distrust of the government. In what appears to be his Wikipedia profile, he claimed that the truth was not yet known about the events that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, and the death of Colonel James Sabow – a Marine officer who was ruled to have committed suicide, a finding protested by his brother, who said he was killed because he knew of weapons and drug smuggling being perpetrated at a military base, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
“I am determined to see that justice is served,” Bedell wrote, before railing on “institutions such as the coup regime of 1963 that maintains itself in power through the global drug trade, financial corruption, and murder, among other crimes.”
In his profile, Bedell said he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at University of California, Santa Cruz, and did graduate work at San Jose State University in biochemistry.
“I’ve studied electrical engineering with the goal of creating microsystems for molecular analysis,” he wrote.
On his profile, he also advocated for the free cultivation of marijuana, and linked to an Orange County felony complaint against him that he said originated from “growing 16 cannabis plants on my balcony in Irvine, CA from March 2006 to June 2006.”
He said that the free growth of marijuana would lead to fiscal stability nationwide.
“One desired result of my effort is (will be) billions and billions of carefully cultivated, highly valuable cannabis plants growing throughout the United States with complete security of property,” he wrote.
Bedell also left an eight-minute, carefully scripted audio recording of his thoughts and philosophy on archive.org, an open source Internet storage area.
Bedell also apparently kept up a page on Amazon, where he had 55 books in his wishlist, many of them focusing on supposed revelations on secret dealings within the government.
The area just outside the Pentagon is heavily trafficked by commuters, serving as a transit hub both for the Washington Metro railway system and many of the region’s buses. The Metro station is one of the busiest in the Washington-area system, with thousands of commuters passing through, transferring from trains to buses.
The Metro entrance is just outside the doors of the Pentagon, meaning anyone can approach the building from the Metro. A force of officers guards the entrance during working hours and people who work inside must flash a badge before entering. Those without badges are ushered to a metal detector to be searched, then are escorted inside.
The Associated Press said investigators were considering the possibility that a second suspect was involved.
Officials refused to speculate on the gunman’s motives. “We just do not have enough information on the suspect to make those determinations this evening,” said Bryan G. Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman.
However, Whitman agreed with Keevill that the gunman was trying to get inside the building.
“He was obviously trying to gain entrance,” said Whitman.
Police said no words were exchanged between the gunman and the officers before shots began flying, sending commuters screaming and scrambling for cover, witnesses told local television news stations.
Keevill said the officers were wearing protective vests. He said he could not say whether the gunman also was wearing a vest and would not describe the assailant’s clothing. Keevill would not say whether the man was a Defense Department employee. Police said a third officer was involved in the incident, but did not say in what way.
In 2005, a Pentagon police officer, James M. Feltis III, became the only officer to die in the line of duty when he was struck by a stolen car driven by a man who was fleeing police. No Pentagon police officers were killed in the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon.
More links and information about Bedell:
Bedell’s apparent YouTube channel.
Bedell’s claimed felony complaint by Orange County law enforcement for his cultivation of marijuana.
Bedell’s apparent Amazon page.
Bedell’s apparent Wikipedia profile:
User:JPatrickBedell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
My hope is to use the creativity of markets and advanced technology to transcend the destructive regimes that have fastened themselves upon the world. I have dreamed for an number of years of creating v:production econosystems, which I hope to apply to the creation of v:security service econosystems using new and economic mechanisms and information technology.
I have a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and studied biochemistry at San Jose State University. I’ve studied electrical engineering with the goal of creating microsystems for molecular analysis.[1][2][3][4] You can see a proposal to use aluminum anodization as an adsorption method for DNA molecules on CMOS chips at v:DNA_integrated_circuit/proposal_import_2007 (which originates from an unsuccessful DARPA proposal to create a “microMIRV” interoperable with standard firearms ammunition), and a proposal to use xenon difluoride to create a picoliter-scale computer-controlled device for sorting biomolecules (available at v:Capillary_electrode_array/proposal_import_2007), including DNA and protein molecules. My goals include the discovery of a protein sequence for the diamondase enzyme, enabling the creation of macroscale diamond structures, and the creation of self-assembled macrosystems with CMOS DNA-integrated circuits. The scale of these and other projects have led me to develop financial instruments representing information as a tool to manage large projects that are very knowledge-intensive.
I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow, as a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions and institutions such as the coup regime of 1963 that maintains itself in power through the global drug trade, financial corruption, and murder, among other crimes. My work to develop information currency is an effort to create a framework for information management that uses financial markets to create the economic signals (prices) that will effect complex human actions in the real world based on specified information. 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 in Irvine, CA from March 2006 to June 2006. I’ve posted the Orange County, CA District Attorney’s complaint for this offense at http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/JPatrickBedell_2006-06-06_cannabis_felony_complaint .
One desired result of my effort is (will be) billions and billions of carefully cultivated, highly valuable cannabis plants growing throughout the United States with complete security of property. I have posted the image to the right in order to illustrate the use of cannabis as a monetary system using digital financial instruments. There are two information currency units in each of the PDF417 codes pictured. One of the information currency units is drawn from a series with “one gram cannabis” with the underlying asset, and the second ICU in each code has as its underlying asset the URL http://www.mises.org/humanaction/pdf/humanaction.pdf and the SHA-1 digest value of the file at that location (fd8205cb8b4793d43b57ba6f6c7367aa700c307a). This is a way of associating the work of Ludwig von Mises with financial value, which may be a tool to implement his ideas in reality. I hope someday to see full-reserve banking and observance of Article One, Section 10 of the US Constitution.
I apologize for the graphic content of some of my contributions, but detailed evidence is sometimes necessary to address important matters. I am very disturbed by the fact that Col. Sabow’s civilian superiors and their successors have been able to continue their narco-mercantilism. For historical comparison, I might resemble the odd German still complaining about the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1938(?). Of course, Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1938!
I am looking for collaborators for ongoing commercial and intellectual efforts. Email to jpbedell at mises.com is welcome!
Related stories:
Media puts spotlight on Hollister after shooting
San Benito High School: Shooter attended school but left before graduating
Childhood peer recalls gatherings with suspect and family
Family was trying to get help for Pentagon shooting suspect
Updated: Parents of Pentagon gunman sought a mental health hold for their son
Bedell’s family: ‘We may never know why he made this terrible decision’
Updated: Hollister man shoots two at Pentagon, is shot and killed
Sources: Suspected Pentagon gunman is from Hollister
