The gunman who opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon on Thursday, injuring two police officers, harbored a deep-seated anger toward federal authorities and may have believed that the government staged the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said Friday. The gunman, John Patrick Bedell, 36, who was killed by the police, made copious -- and often rambling -- postings and recorded lectures on the Internet over the past few years. In them he raged against what he saw as a totalitarian federal government, which he faulted for its handling of monetary policy, public education and private property rights. Reb Monaco, 65, a longtime friend of Bedell's, said: 'From what I gather from the family, he's been on a downhill spin for a while. And they were very, very concerned about him.' Monaco added that Bedell, who was unmarried, a regular marijuana smoker and living with his parents, seemed to slide into a deep paranoia over the past couple years. About a month ago, Bedell disappeared and his parents filed a missing-persons report with the authorities, Monaco said, adding that the parents also told the police that Bedell might be a danger to himself. Not long thereafter, he said, the police pulled Bedell over in Texas and found drugs in his possession. When the police officer called Bedell's parents, they cited his mental health problems and asked the officer to institutionalize him, Monaco said. Since Bedell was an adult, the police did not have the authority to commit him, so they sent him home, he said. Bedell disappeared again weeks later. His attack at the Pentagon was the second in two weeks on a government facility by someone with strong negative feelings about the federal government. Earlier, a man irate at the IRS crashed his plane into the offices of that agency in Austin, Texas. On Friday, the police here were trying to determine whether Bedell's views on the 1991 death of a Marine officer, Col. James E. Sabow, in El Toro, Calif., played a role in his attack on the Pentagon officers. Sabow's death, which was officially ruled a suicide, is the subject of numerous dark theories about military cover-ups, alleging that he was murdered because he was about to expose covert military operations in Central America involving drug smuggling. Bedell wrote on the Web that he was 'determined to see that justice is served' in Sabow's death and that to uncover the truth behind the death would be 'a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the Sept. 11 demolitions.' The police said they had ruled out the possibility of a second gunman even though they saw Bedell, who was killed in an exchange of gunfire, speaking to someone before firing on the officers. Federal authorities also said there was no indication that Bedell had a connection to any domestic or international terrorist group. After searching Bedell's green Toyota, which was parked at a nearby shopping mall, the police found additional ammunition and signs that he had driven within the past several weeks from Hollister, Calif., where he was he living. 'We are devastated as a family by the news from yesterday,' Bedell's parents said in a statement Friday. 'To the outside world, this tragedy is the first and only thing they will know of Patrick.' 'To us, he was a beloved son, brother, grandson, nephew and cousin,' they said. 'We may never know why he made this terrible decision. One thing is clear though -- his actions were caused by an illness and not a defective character.' His mother, Kaye Bedell, is the director of allied health at Gavilan College, and his father, John Bedell Sr., is a financial planner in Hollister. When he appeared at the Pentagon on Thursday around 6 p.m., Bedell had a full beard and was dressed in a blazer, slacks and a white collared shirt, and surveillance cameras showed him walking slowly toward the Pentagon entrance before pulling out two 9-millimeter semiautomatic weapons. He began shooting when he arrived at the security checkpoint, near the entrance to the Pentagon subway station. Officers Jeffrey Amos and Marvin Carraway were superficially wounded, one in the shoulder and one in the thigh, according to the police. The officers returned fire, critically wounding Bedell with a shot to the head and arm, and he later died, said Richard Keevill, chief of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. The officers were taken to George Washington University Hospital in Washington and later released. Pentagon officials said that since the shooting last year on the army base at Fort Hood, Texas, they had been especially alert, and the officers were commended publicly Friday for their performance in handling the incident. Bedell was the chief executive of a Hollister-based company called DNAputer Research, according to filings with the California secretary of state's office. He received a bachelor's degree in science from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2002. He majored in physics. His postings on the Internet covered a broad range of topics, but a key theme was Sept. 11. 'This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens in an event such as the Sept. 11 attack as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control,' he said in one audio recording on the Web. 'The true nature of such a regime would find its clearest expresssion in the satanic violence currently ongoing in Iraq.' Yet even as he railed against the federal government, Bedell also sought to do business with the military. In a 2004 research proposal that he wrote for submission to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he proposed a $170,000 nanotechnology project that could be useful in warfare. He described himself in the proposal as having 'an intense desire to contribute to the national security of the United States.' A spokeswoman for the agency said it had no record of granting an award to the company. Court documents indicate that Bedell was arrested in Orange County, Calif., in 2006 for growing marijuana and resisting an officer of the peace. The police indicated that Bedell had other minor brushes with the law but they declined to elaborate. For neighbors of the Bedells in Hollister the news of the shooting could not have been more shocking. 'This is just completely out of blue,' said one neighbor, Ronald Domingues. 'I would never imagine him doing anything like that.' 