According to Chief Richard Keevill of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, Bedell was armed with two 9mm semiautomatic pistols and had several loaded magazines.
[4] Bedell and the injured officers were transported to George Washington University Hospital by units of the Arlington County Fire Department.
[7][1] He suffered from bipolar disorder and had been institutionalized several times,[8] according to a 2006 Orange County court filing regarding an arrest for marijuana possession.
[13] The Christian Science Monitor noted Bedell was an "anti-Bush registered Democrat who believed 9/11 was planned and carried out by the US government," but argued it would nevertheless be "facile" to call him left-wing.
The Monitor instead grouped Bedell with "non-partisan" or "post-partisan" anti-government extremists such as Joseph Andrew Stack and the Ku Klux Klan.
[17] Bedell posted a proposal on Google Code for an "open insurgent project" that would "integrate existing open-source codebases and new development to create an MMORPG simulation of low-cost defenses against futuristic, modern, and historical military opponents using a wide range of simulated defensive responses with real world systems.
[19] On March 5, 2010, media reports said that Bedell may have harbored entrenched bitterness towards the U.S. Armed Forces and that he had doubts about the official story of the September 11 attacks.
[16] Bedell was described as motivated by a hatred of the federal government and an expressed desire to expose what he considered[22] an injustice in the case of a military suicide he argued was a coverup.
He apparently wrote on a Wikipedia page that bringing attention to what he felt was military corruption would "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.