Hostage taker shot by police at Discovery Channel’s HQ

by Steve Ragan - Sep 1 2010, 21:32

After a day long standoff, Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said that the suspect who took hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, has been shot and the three hostages have now been freed.

At 4:48 p.m. EST, the suspect, identified as James Lee (43), was shot after police determined the hostages were in imminent danger. While it was confirmed that Lee was indeed armed, police are still investigating a number of devices that are being treated as explosives.

According to Manger, one of several metallic canisters on Lee's person appeared to go off after he had been shot, leading investigators and other officials to launch a search of the building to locate other possible devices.

Lee is an activist who was arrested in February of 2008 for another incident outside Discovery’s HQ. At that time he was arrested for disorderly conduct and, according to CNN, littering after throwing money during a single-man protest. This August, his two-year supervised probation ended.

Lee's current condition is unknown, Manger said, but according to the police chief, he was taken into custody.

[Update: It was later confirmed that Lee had died from his wounds.]

The following is written in a manifesto on savetheplanetprotest.com [cache link], a site owned by Lee: 

“Focus must be given on how people can live without giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution.

“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.”

Lee also wrote that humans are “the most destructive, filthy, pollutive [sic] creatures around and are wrecking what's left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.

“For every human born, acres of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 years of that new human's lifespan!...All human procreation and farming must cease!”

Given the topic of his website, it is possible that Lee's actions at Discovery's HQ are directly related to his protest in 2008. However, this is inconclusive based on what information is available from police on the scene.

“I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it. These are the demands and sayings of Lee.”

Additional information on Lee can be found on his MySpace account.

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