The gunman killed Wednesday afternoon in Silver Spring started his twisted crusade to protect the planet after reading an obscure book on overpopulation and watching former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
James J. Lee, 43, said on his MySpace page that he went to a bookstore to reflect on his life when he found a book called “Ishmael,” the first of a trilogy by Daniel Quinn that has become a favorite of environmentalists and anarchists.
“The books are what I have been looking for the better half of my life,” he wrote.
By 2008, Lee was well into his bizarre campaign against the Discovery Channel, whose shows he claimed promoted overpopulation, war and the slaying of whales.
On a Web site he created called SaveThePlanetProtest.com, he posted a list of demands calling for the end of television shows that encouraged “the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions,” he wrote.
He demanded programs to stop “the anchor baby filth. … They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistent jobs!”
Lee took out an ad in a local newspaper promoting a demonstration he was holding at the Discovery headquarters and bashing the company for “causing more harm than good.”
At the demonstration, Lee was arrested for disorderly conduct and littering after he threw fistfuls of cash into the air.
Police said he served 10 days in jail. A court order to stay away from the Discovery building ended two weeks ago, police said.
An Examiner reporter on Wednesday went to Lee’s last listed address on Rosemary Hills Drive in Silver Spring, but the family who lives there now said it didn’t know him. The apartment management refused to comment on whether Lee had lived there.
Although he once told the Gazette newspaper that he was inspired by Gore, his MySpace review of the vice president’s book was mixed.
“It was very enlightening. However, at the end he didn’t offer any real solutions, as if changing a lightbulb would even put a scratch in the global warming epidemic,” Lee wrote. “The book was half good, which means the part about science was good. The rest seemed like a commercial for sainthood.”
