WASHINGTON — In the eight weeks before John Patrick Bedell parked his 1998 Toyota at the suburban Pentagon City mall and emerged ready to open fire at officers standing outside the Pentagon, he had crisscrossed the country in a frenetic and sometimes doped- up state that had his parents so worried that they alerted police he might be armed.
On Thursday evening outside the Pentagon Metro station, Bedell, 36, a troubled Californian who loved marijuana, computers and conspiracy theories, shot two Pentagon officers. One of them shot Bedell in the arm and head, killing him.
Police records and interviews with those who knew him describe a man who had been slipping into increasingly disturbed thinking for years but whose behavior became uncharacteristically erratic only in recent months.
“We may never know why he made this terrible decision,” Bedell’s family said in a statement Friday. “One thing is clear though — his actions were caused by an illness and not a defective character.”
In early January, a Texas Highway Patrol officer stopped Bedell near Texarkana for speeding. Bedell’s car was in “disarray,” the officer noted, and the driver was lurching up and down and rocking on his knees, hanging up on a series of cellphone calls that Bedell said were from his mother.
Concerned about Bedell’s mental state, the officer called his parents and learned they had filed a missing-person report noting Bedell had been “detained for mental evaluation before.”
Police records show Bedell’s mother, Kaye, who works as director of allied health at Gavilan College in Gilroy, Calif., told the Texas police her son was OK, and he was sent on his way. Bedell, according to police, said he was heading to the East Coast but instead drove home.
He wouldn’t stay long. On Feb. 1, Bedell hit the road again and was stopped by an officer in Reno, Nev. He had drifted across traffic lanes and stopped yards short of a stoplight, according to a police report. Bedell was charged with possession of marijuana after a pink pot pipe was found in his pants pocket. He made bond.
Bedell left an electronic trail thick with written, video and audio manifestoes. In an audio address posted on the Internet, he suggested that after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the United States had been infiltrated by a cabal of gangsters he called the “coup regime.” Bedell believed that the group has continued manipulating the country “up to the present day” and was probably responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war.
