Gunman killed after shooting 2 Pentagon police

[March 05, 2010]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- The gunman who shot two Pentagon police officers was heavily armed and spent weeks driving to the Capital area from the West Coast, authorities said Friday. Resentment of the U.S. government and suspicions over the 9/11 attacks have surfaced in writings by the Californian identified as the man fatally wounded in a hail of return fire.

John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was identified as the shooter and authorities said he'd had previous run-ins with the law.

Investigators have found no immediate connection to terrorism, and the attack 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.

Keevill described Bedell as "very well-educated" and well-dressed, saying Bedell was wearing a suit, armed with two 9 mm 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.

Bedell, 36, died Thursday night from head wounds received in a volley of fire with police. Keevill 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."

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."

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.

Keevill said he did not know the shooter's motive.

"I have no idea what his intentions were," said Keevill, who had late Thursday described the attack in this way:

"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."

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.

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., 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.

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. 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.

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.

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; By MATT APUZZO and DEVLIN BARRETT]

Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Christine Simmons, Pauline Jelinek, Anne Gearan, Mike Gracia, Nafeesa Syeed, Philip Elliott and Kasey Jones contributed to this report.

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