BERKELEY — For more than seven hours early Thursday, a well-armed gunman with an apparent grudge against American blondes took over a popular college pub, taunting and terrorizing 33 patrons after he killed one student and wounded seven other people, including a policeman.
The gunman, Iranian-born Mehrdad Dashti, 30, was fatally shot in a brief gun battle with police who stormed Henry's Publick House & Grille at 7:23 a.m., first tossing in a "flash-bang" grenade that permitted the hostages, many of them students at nearby UC Berkeley, to escape out the back and side doors.
Berkeley police described Dashti as "deranged," and a county health department document found in his apartment reportedly listed him as a paranoid schizophrenic. Dashti had told San Francisco police last year as they investigated a stolen checks charge that he was the "victim of a government experiment" on his mind. An arrest warrant on the charge was issued for him last week.
During a siege that seemed as grotesquely puzzling as it was frightening, Dashti had lined up hostages like "human shields" in front of the pub's big mullioned windows.
The tense night was made more harrowing by Dashti's bizarre demands and his mood swings--such as shooting out lights in the bar, then apologizing for the cascade of broken glass, and ordering hostages to yell and scream every time he fired a shot into the ceiling. Stripped to a loincloth, he ranted for hours inside the mirrored, brass-trimmed bar of the Durant Hotel, witnesses and hostages recounted.
Through a hostage who spoke with police on the telephone, and by statements Dashti ordered other hostages to shout out the broken windows, he demanded that the San Francisco police chief appear on television with his pants down and asked to be on television himself. He complained about being turned down for a student loan at Berkeley, and asked to meet with former CIA Director Richard Helms.
Inside the bar, he harangued American women as "slutty" and singled out blonde women hostages for sexual abuse, forcing them to "drop their pants" and directing male hostages to sexually molest them "with carrots he brought with him," said Phil Kim, an architecture student who escaped earlier in the siege.
All the while, police said, Dashti--who has been in the United States since 1978--drank beer although he was a teetotaler for religious reasons, his roommate Frederick Smith said. Smith said Dashti was Muslim.
