John Patrick Bedell was consumed by an anti-government creed when he drove from Hollister, Calif., parked his 1998 Toyota Avalon at the Fashion Centre Pentagon City Mall, pulled a 9mm handgun from his pocket and opened fire outside the Pentagon.
Two Pentagon Police officers — Jeffrey Amos and Marvin Carraway — were grazed by the bullets around 6:40 p.m. Thursday before they and one other officer were able to shoot the 36-year-old in the left tricep and head, taking him down. Bedell died at 10 p.m. at the George Washington University Hospital. The two wounded officers were treated and released. The Pentagon Metro station, which was shutdown immediately following the shooting, reopened around noon Friday.
There is no indication that Bedell was tied to any larger terrorist conspiracy and authorities say he acted alone.
The FBI said investigators are reviewing Bedell’s podcasts and blog posts scattered across the Internet which show he believed the government was controlled by a criminal organization.
“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,” he wrote on posting to the social networking Web site LinkedIn.
Bedell had a full beard and was wearing dress slacks, a white-collared shirt and a blazer when he approached the Pentagon entrance adjacent to the Pentagon Metro station, the FBI said. He blended in with commuters, and officers thought he was reaching for identification when Bedell pulled out the gun, said Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police.
“He walked up very cool,” Keevill said. “He had no real emotion in his face.”
Bedell believed the Sept., 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were part of a wide-reaching government conspiracy. But his ideology seems to have reached into every niche of anti-government ideology.
Following a June 2006 arrest in Irvine, Calif., for growing marijuana, Bedell said in a podcast that the “cannabis prohibition is the least defensible and most unjust aspect of the prohibitionist regime existing throughout the world today. I decided in March 2006 to cultivate cannabis in full view of the world.”
Bedell, Keevill said, was prepared for a large-scale assault on Thursday. He was carrying a second 9mm semiautomatic and “many rounds” of ammunition.
