Powers Decided to ‘Make Doctors Pay,’ Court Told

Bradford Warren Powers Jr. told police that he decided to “take the law into his own hands and make the doctors pay” for his father’s death when he allegedly shot four people in a rampage at Mission Bay Memorial Hospital, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Eichler made that assertion in a brief San Diego Municipal Court hearing in which Powers pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder.

His eyes moist and bloodshot, the 46-year-old La Jolla man spoke only once to the judge, when he interrupted the hearing and said, “I don’t wish for bail.”

Judge William Woodward set bail at $2.5 million, despite Eichler’s request that Powers be held without bail. The prosecutor had argued that Powers had planned to flee to Oregon before he turned himself in to Oceanside police an hour after he allegedly opened fire in an emergency room last Saturday.

The spray of bullets killed a nurse and a student trainee--on his first day at the job--and wounded the on-duty physician and the father of a patient.

The shootings occurred about eight hours after Brad Powers Sr. died in the same emergency room, suffering a heart attack while doctors were attempting to repair a ruptured abdominal aneurysm.

Authorities alleged that the younger Powers, who has had psychiatric problems dating back at least 25 years, was distraught over the death of his father, a well-known architectural illustrator, and returned to the scene to seek revenge.

In the days since the shootings, a dark side to the father-son relationship has emerged. The younger Powers, who lived at home and seldom held a job for more than several months, was occasionally physically and verbally abusive to his father, a doctor and a family attorney said in telephone interviews.

At the request of a family member, the coroner’s office investigated whether physical abuse had contributed to the elder Powers’ death, said Dr. H. E. Hammerstead, who tried to save the aging man when he was brought into the emergency room. The coroner’s investigation, however, found no signs of physical abuse, he said.