John Patrick Bedell, who died after firing shots at Pentagon security guards yesterday, may have been motivated in part by his obsession with a story the Weekly has covered extensively: the Jan. 1991 death of Col. James Sabow at the now-closed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.
Bedell, a 36-year-old Hollister man with a history of mental problems and a 2006 arrest in Irvine for marijuana cultivation on his record, the AP is reporting, appears to have been obsessed with Sept. 11 conspiracy theories and anger over U.S. marijuana laws. Someone using “JPatrickBedell” as a screen name also recently posted comments on Internet sites about the Sabow death, which the colonel's family believes was a murder tied to covert operations they believe were being carried out at the base.
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According to the AP story, someone named “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
thee source of theories of a cover up. Sabow's family has maintained
that he was murdered because he was about to expose cover military
operations in Central America involving drug smuggling.”
OC Weekly
has published numerous articles over the years about Sabow's death,
most of them focusing on the efforts of his brother, David Sabow, a
retired neurosurgeon in Rapid City, SD, who never accepted the
coroner's ruling that his brother killed himself. Dr. Sabow filed a
lawsuit 12 years ago charging that the military had created intentional
emotional distress to the Sabow family by verbally abusing him and
other family members when they threatened to go to the press with their
complaints about the initial investigation into Sabow's death.
That
lawsuit, which led to some surreal courtroom antics by former Christic
Institute lawyer Daniel Sheehan–in which he repeatedly referred to
“black box” evidence and unnamed eyewitnesses to the alleged
murder–was tossed out of court. Here is that story.
Click on the links below to read several other Weekly
articles over the past decade dealing with Dr. Sabow's efforts to prove
his brother was murdered, as well one about Tosh Plumlee, a pilot who
claims he flew covert missions between Central America and El Toro in
the 1980s. And yes, we checked: There are no comments by Bedell on any
of these stories.
Murder He Wrote: Brother Alleges County is Covering up El Toro colonel's Murder
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).