Suspect Took Hostages at Hotel to Get Media Attention, Police Say

A 10-hour hostage drama at the Hyatt Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport was staged to lure the national media to an impromptu news conference and spread a self-styled religious zealot’s belief that Armageddon was at hand, investigators said Wednesday.

Rollen Frederick Stewart, who barricaded himself inside the hotel Tuesday morning, is scheduled to be arraigned today. He is being held without bail at Parker Center jail on suspicion of burglarizing the hotel, taking a maid and two transients hostage and injuring 10 police officers by setting off a homemade chemical device, police said.

“He thinks the second coming of Jesus Christ is on the way, and he wants to spread the word,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Tom King. “I don’t consider him to be a nut. I consider him to be a religious zealot.”

For years Stewart, 47, has worn a rainbow-colored wig and hoisted oversized religious placards to try to attract attention at major sporting events. He has said that he discovered God in the early 1980s after hearing Charles R. Taylor, a Baptist minister who lives in Anaheim, on television.

“He’s not dangerous, he won’t hurt anyone,” Taylor said Wednesday. The minister, who went to the hotel Tuesday afternoon in a unsuccessful attempt to persuade Stewart to surrender, described him as “a little on the fanatical side. He meant well, but he took the wrong approach.”

Investigators have also tied Stewart to two cases in which stink bombs were set off at the downtown office of The Times and at a Torrance church last March. He has been a fugitive since last May, when a warrant for his arrest was issued in connection with four stink bomb attacks in Orange County, including one inside the Orange County Register newspaper offices in Santa Ana. Police there said they were baffled at how the high-profile character was able to elude them for so long.

Detectives are providing information to federal agents and police departments in other states to determine if Stewart is a suspect elsewhere.

Details of Stewart’s tense standoff at the Hyatt emerged Wednesday, with investigators revealing that the suspect took an RTD bus to the hotel early Tuesday morning after picking up two transient laborers in downtown Los Angeles and promising them plumbing jobs.

Dressed in a dark, pin-striped suit, he allegedly took the men to the seventh floor of the hotel and randomly chose a room where 39-year-old maid Paula Madera was cleaning the bathroom.

She initially thought Stewart was a hotel guest who had returned to his room, but a scuffle soon broke out when Stewart tried to force the two men into the bathroom with Madera, police said.

One of the men, Salvador Ramirez, blocked the bathroom door with his foot, fought Stewart off and fled with his friend, police said. Madera, who was unable to escape, locked the bathroom door from the inside, called her supervisor and spent much of the rest of the day cowering in the bathtub, police said.

To help her recover from the ordeal, hotel officials Wednesday offered Madera, her husband and four children a vacation at any Hyatt in the United States.

After the transients fled, Stewart set off a stink bomb outside the room, nailed the door shut and posted biblical citations in the window, police said. He was armed with an automatic pistol and spent much of the day smoking marijuana, police said.

The first 10 officers to reach the seventh floor were treated at local hospitals for chemical inhalation after they breathed the noxious fumes in the hallway, police said. The Special Weapons and Tactics Team raided the room shortly before 6 p.m. by blowing open the door with flash-bang grenades.