The suspect in the fatal car bomb attack on a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, posted a string of videos on YouTube documenting his experiments with homemade explosives, according to a report.
Guy Edward Bartkus is investigators’ only suspect concerning the blast at the American Reproductive Centers of Palm Springs, which took place at 11 a. m. on Saturday morning.
The 25 year-old, of nearby Twentynine Palms, is believed to be the person found dead next to the detonated Ford Fusion in its car park.
Four people were injured but no members of staff or reproductive materials held at the clinic were harmed in the explosion, according to a statement. Its IVF center, housed in a single-storey building close by, was gutted.
The FBI quickly labelled the incident “an intentional act of terrorism” and law enforcement officers are now reviewing social media accounts believed to have been operated by Bartkus, ABC News reports.
One of these is “Indict Evolution,” a YouTube channel that has been taken down in the wake of Saturday’s events but which reportedly dates back at least six years and features videos of explosives tests with titles like “Uranium Ore Next to Geiger Counter” and “Thorite from Thorium Mine.”
“We terminated channels associated with the suspect,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement, adding that they had been removed for violating the company’s policy regarding the promotion of violent extremism.
A username that investigators believe was associated with Bartkus shared one of the videos on a suicide-themed message board on May 12, ABC reports. Then, last Thursday, the same account posted about death by carbon monoxide poisoning before alluding to “some extra drama that I probably shouldn’t say haha.”
In other writings traced to Bartkus and cited by KCAL News, the suspect expressed antinatalist or “efilist” beliefs and described himself as a “pro-mortalist” intent on causing death “to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings.”
In a 30-minute audio clip also uncovered, Bartkus stated: “I figured I would just make a recording explaining why I’ve decided to bomb an IVF building or clinic.
“Basically, it just comes down to I’m angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here. These are people who are having kids after they’ve sat there and thought about it. How much more stupid can it get?”
Richard Bartkus, the suspect’s estranged father, has since told The New York Times his son played with matches, stink bombs and smoke bombs in his teens but “nothing major, nothing like a ‘bomb’ bomb, but he’d build rockets, shoot them in the air.”
In a separate interview with KTLA, Richard Bartkus recounted how his son had once set fire to their family home: “After he had burned the house down, he started changing a little bit, he’d light fires. I was too strict for him, so he wanted to stay with Mom until the divorce came through. Mom was lenient.”
While there have been past attacks on abortion clinics and people who work at them in the U.S. for many years, attacks on fertility clinics have been far rarer.
Palm Springs is a city of roughly 45,000 people about a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, and has long been known as a vacation spot for the rich and famous. The resort city is situated in the Coachella Valley within the Colorado Desert.
