Update: Police Kill Gunman, Ending Hostage Situation

By Liz Robbins and Brian Stelter, The New York Times

Police officers shot and killed a gunman with a history of protesting against the Discovery Channel, ending a nearly four-hour ordeal on Wednesday at the company’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. The gunman, apparently wearing explosives, had taken two employees and a security guard hostage, authorities said.

The hostages, all men, were unharmed.

While the rest of the 1,900 employees and the children in the building’s day-care facility were evacuating throughout the afternoon, the police were negotiating by phone with the suspect, who was on the first floor of the building. But at 4:48 p.m., the police shot the suspect when they thought the lives of the hostages were in danger, the Montgomery County police chief, J. Thomas Manger, said at a news conference outside the headquarters.

“Officers were able to get into position where very close to him,” Chief Manger said. “They were close enough to hear what he was saying and what he was doing on camera. At one point the suspect pulled out a handgun and pointed it at one of the hostages. At that point, our tactical units moved in. They shot the suspect. The suspect is deceased.”

A Discovery spokesman, David Leavy, identified the gunman as James J. Lee. A Web site owned by Mr. Lee, SaveThePlanetProtest.com, was established in January 2008, according to domain name records, and it asserts that the Discovery Channel was producing programs about the environment for profit and not for humanitarian reasons.

Discovery Communications is one of the foremost providers of environmental and educational television programming. It operates the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, and a number of other cable channels.

The police said that the suspect had been arrested in February 2008 and convicted of disorderly conduct. The protest itself was bizarre, Mr. Leavy said, when Mr. Lee brought $20,000 worth of cash and threw it into the air and had a crowd of people rush and grab it.

He was sentenced to two years of probation in August 2008, and the police said he was barred from coming within 500 feet of the Discovery headquarters. The probation period ended two weeks ago, and police said the company had no contact with him in that period.

But he entered its building at around 1 p.m. on Wednesday in downtown Silver Spring, bringing one of Washington’s largest and busiest suburbs to a standstill for hours as the drama played out, backing traffic up on the Beltway.

The police said the man had walked through the front door with two backpacks and two boxes that they believed contained explosive devices. A producer for NBC News, calling the headquarters, was connected to a man who identified himself as James J. Lee, according to a spokeswoman for NBC News. The producer recorded the conversation, notified the Montgomery County police. NBC later released the transcript.

“I have a gun and I have a bomb,” Mr. Lee said on the call. “I have several bombs strapped to my body ready to go off.”

Mr. Leavy said that Discovery Communications had been “aware” of Mr. Lee from his arrest and his most recent postings of demands on his Web site.

“If you followed what he said publicly online, I don’t think it’s rational,” Mr. Leavy said in the news conference.

A Discovery employee who now works at the company’s New York office but was based in Silver Spring for many years, said Mr. Lee “used to picket” outside the headquarters on a regular basis. The employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the hostage situation, said Mr. Lee would pay homeless people to help hold his placard.

But the tenor of Mr. Lee’s protests changed sometime in August, when his Web site, formerly listed as being “under construction” was put back online, enumerating a list of demands from the channel. The Web site called for Discovery to show programs about how to save the planet by decreasing the human population.

Specifically, it said that the TLC and Discovery Health channels should discontinue shows about “the birth of any more parasitic human infants,” and “in those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed.”

Chief Manger said that the most of suspect’s demands during the hostage standoff “mirrored what he has on his Web site.”