On January 15th, 1990, a US Navy sailor stationed at the Bangor Trident nuclear submarine base in Kitsap County, WA shot and killed 3 people
wounded a third, before killing himself later that night.
The first 2 people were fellow sailors in his barracks on the base in Bangor. One was found in the lounge/break area of the barracks and the other, the sailor's roommate, was found in their room in that same barracks.
The third person killed was a local pawn shop clerk in Bremerton, across the street from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. The person that was wounded was her brother, the manager of the pawn shop.
The events originated the night before as the sailor that killed the 3 people was drinking at another sailor's house off base when he became belligeren
and was making threats of ending the fellow sailor's career.
After making the threats, the sailor left and ended up getting into a minor car accident at a grocery store in Silverdale (roughly half-way between Bangor and Bremerton). He left the scene and went back to the base in Bangor.
Entering the base, still clearly drunk, he was stopped by base police and charged with DUI. He wasn't arrested or anything serious though. Despite a 9mm pistol noticed on the passenger seat of his car.
Instead of arrest or more serious consequences, he was escorted back to his barracks and told to report to the administrative office for paperwork (due to the DUI) later that morning. Instead of doing what he was ordered to do, he went into his barracks and decided to shoot and kill the one sailor in the lounge/break area and his roommate in the room they shared.
After the 2 murders, he left the base in Bangor and went into Bremerton to replace the gun that was in his car with a new one from the local pawn shop
Roughly the same time he entered the pawn shop was when the bodies of the 2 sailors were discovered in his barracks. It was after being noticed as missing earlier that morning, that they were found.
Following the shooting at the pawn shop, the sailor left with the stolen 9mm pistol and headed South from Bremerton. Later that night, he found a hotel in Vancouver. (This city is just North of Portland but on the Washington state side of the border--the border being the Columbia River.) It was at this hotel that the sailor took his own life with that same stolen 9mm pistol.
There are other details that expand on this seemingly random shooting spree
by the sailor...
1. The fact that this sailor was part of a naval crew on a nuclear submarine, AND that he was a Fire Control Technician, meant he worked with classified information for the US government on a daily basis.
2. The date this shooting spree took place was January 15th, 1990 which meant the cold war was still ongoing, and a sailor with the wealth of classified information that this particular one had would have been of great value to the USSR.
3. Also regarding this date, the worst landline telephone outage in history occurred when, for 9 hours, over 50 million calls were blocked--US-based and international.
4. Specific to the sailor himself, he came to the US in 1975 from Guyana where he lived with his parents previously. A year before, Jim Jones moved his cult from California to Guyana. The soon-to-be sailor and his parents were roughly 2 hours away from what would be known as Jonestown in Guyana.
5. Despite the US Navy having concluded there were no alterior motives, like espionage, there was a note found during the shooting and suicide investigation that specifically stated he, Shyam David Drizpaul--the sailor that murdered 3 people, wounded another, and killed himself, was part of espionage.
35 years, 1 month, and 4 days have passed since either the most random or the most coincidental date that ever occurred...
and that nobody remembers ever having existed.
15JAN90
#USNavy #PSNS #NavalBaseKitsap
#Jonestown #ColdWar #GunViolence
