Gunman Slain as Police End Pub Standoff

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.

Henry’s bar is a congenial, Tudor-looking hangout near the UC Berkeley campus, where Dashti attended school briefly before getting an engineering degree in 1984 at San Francisco State. It is a favorite of fraternity and sorority members, and a sorority party was still going on when Dashti walked in at 12:15 a.m., carrying a briefcase containing three handguns, one of them a 30-round, 9-millimeter automatic assault pistol, and fired a few shots into the ceiling.

(Authorities said later two of the three weapons were legally registered.)

“He said he wanted to shoot some blondes. He started yelling about American women being slutty. Somebody made a move at him and that person was shot,” said Troy Barnhart, a 19-year-old sophomore who said several friends had been held hostage and told him their accounts. Barnhart stood at the window of his boarding house room across from the bar, and, with other friends, watched the siege.

Berkeley Police Chief Dash E. Butler said two officers writing up a traffic ticket nearby heard the shooting and hurried over to Henry’s, where Dashti opened fire on them. Sgt. Ron Barela, grazed by flying glass or a bullet, was treated at a hospital and released.

The initial bursts of gunfire killed Berkeley student John G. Sheehy, 22, of nearby Lafayette and wounded six others. None of the wounds appeared to be life-threatening.

Karen Grundhofer, 22, a junior from Newport Beach; Stacey Heley, 26, who does not attend UC Berkeley, and John Landa, 21, a junior from Los Angeles, were treated at local hospitals for gunshot wounds and released. Finley Tomlinson White, 23, a junior from Seattle, was hospitalized in stable condition. Christian Hobbs, who earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from UC Berkeley in spring, 1990, was reported in stable condition and was to undergo additional surgery for a leg wound. Rebecca Davis, 22, a senior from San Jose, was hospitalized in good condition.

Warren Techentin, a senior from Pasadena, and Kurt Braun, 21, were treated for injuries from flying glass.

Dashti allowed some of the remaining 40 to 45 patrons to carry out the wounded, according to witnesses and hostages.

One woman who was allowed to leave told reporters that Dashti “kept repeating, ‘I don’t want to kill anybody,’ and he kept firing his gun.”

He also allowed non-white-looking women to leave, telling them to notify police that “they had done this to me . . . this isn’t my fault, I wrote several letters to the FBI.” Hostage Douglas Moore, 25, the bar manager and a student, recounted: “He had something against Americans. . . . He accused women of showing too much leg. He accused them of wearing tight skirts, short skirts. He said it was that kind of trash that was leading guys like him on and that they deserved to be punished. He did a pretty good job of degrading the women.”

(Dashti had been dating a blonde student who called him regularly, his roommate Smith recounted, but less than a month ago, Dashti had asked Smith, who is black, ‘Do you know any black women I can marry?’ ”)

Moore also remembered Dashti saying the government “owed him $16 trillion for mental telepathy work, and this was his way of getting it back.” In letters written to various government officials, Dashti had reportedly demanded the states of California, Nevada and Oregon as reparation.

Over the next seven hours, at perhaps 20-minute intervals, Dashti fired three- or four-dozen shots, most of them into the high ceiling, and smashed bottles and glassware along the long wooden bar.

Each time he fired, witnesses and hostages said, he ordered a hostage to scream or yell as though someone had been hit. But police said they knew from information being relayed to them by a hostage--whom Dashti had ordered to talk to negotiators who had telephoned the bar--that no one was hurt.

Police settled in swiftly after the early gun bursts. As a helicopter crisscrossed the sky, marksmen herded students and wakeful families back from their apartment windows, while other gunmen took up perches in the University Art Museum across the way.

Residents, too, had clear views of much of what went on inside, and watched as Dashti began the night with the self-defense technique of lining hostages along the walls. Said senior Joel Slavonia, 21, who lives in the Theta Delta Chi fraternity next to the museum, “He was using them as human shields at the windows.”

Todd Miller, 21, a senior and fellow fraternity member, said: “He was making people smash bottles and drink beer. You could see some of that through the windows. You could see through the windows that he made people take their pants off and take their clothes off.”

As police negotiators called from within the hotel, Dashti also relayed his demands by forcing hostages to shout out to police, and they switched poignantly back and forth from first person to third-person in shaky voices.

One hostage repeated Dashti’s demands that the chief of police take off his pants on television, then pleaded: “I’m going to be shot any minute, please help.”

But it was Dashti himself who screamed at times, “When is it going to end? How long? How long?” He paced the room, sometimes moving furniture around, hostages said, and would “alternate between hyper and coming down,” said Police Lt. Jim Polk, the field commander.

Dashti’s disjointed demands and denunciations began to make more sense only hours later, in light of information from police and acquaintances.

San Francisco police had mailed an arrest warrant to Dashti’s Berkeley apartment, stemming from their investigation into $16,950 in stolen checks. Police believe an accomplice stole the checks and gave them to Dashti, who deposited them in a bank account under an assumed name.

It was after dawn when police decided that the edgy standoff could not last much longer, that negotiations would not end it. Polk said “we felt . . . he might go off and start shooting people.”

At 7:23 a.m., several officers burst in the street door of the bar. They said they tossed in ahead of them the “flash-bang” device to distract Dashti, who shot at them as they came in the door. Police shot back, and moments later Dashti, blood smeared on his naked chest, was driven off to Highland Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7:45 a.m.

The surprise of the percussion grenade allowed the hostages to race out and none was hurt. “We got real lucky,” Polk said.

One of the first hostages out the door was Kerry Gorman, 21, a member of UC Berkeley’s rowing team. He looked haggard and confused. Police Capt. Phil Doran, who had been at the scene all night, ran over and swept Gorman into a hug. Gorman is his nephew.

Morrison reported from Los Angeles and Zonana from Berkeley.

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