OAN’s Roy Francis
12:43 AM – Saturday, June 10, 2023
Theodore Kaczynski, the convicted terrorist known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his prison cell on Saturday morning.
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The Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed the death. Kaczynski, who was 81-years-old, was found unresponsive in his cell around 12:30 am ET on Saturday morning, he was then transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.
“Responding staff immediately initiated life-saving measures,” a spokesperson said. “Mr Kaczynski was transported by EMS to a local hospital and subsequently pronounced deceased by hospital personnel.”
Kaczynski had been held at a maximum security facility in Colorado until December 2021, when he was transported to a federal medical center in North Carolina due to poor health.
In May 1998, he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for his campaign of terror that began in 1978 and continued until his 1995. He had admitted to committing 16 bombings in those years, killing three people, and injuring two dozen, permanently maiming several people.
His terror campaign had changed the way that Americans mailed packages, and boarded planes, in July 1995 virtually all air travel on the West Coast was halted due to the threat that he had posed.
In September 1995, he had forced the Washington Post and New York Times to publish his 35,000-word manifesto titled “Industrial Society and Its Future.”
When the manifesto was published, Kaczynski’s brother David, and David’s wife Linda, recognized familiarity in the manifesto and had alerted the FBI about Ted.
After a years-long manhunt, authorities finally captured him in Lincoln, Montana in 1996 in a cabin filled with explosive materials, two completed bombs, journals and a coded diary.
“It was a nightmare,” his brother said in a 2005 speech at Bennington College. “I was literally thinking, ‘My brother’s a serial killer, the most wanted man in America.’”
After Sally Johnson, a psychiatrist, interviewed Kaczynski in prison, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
“Mr. Kaczynski’s delusions are mostly persecutory in nature,” she said in her report. “The central themes involve his belief that he is being maligned and harassed by family members and modern society.”
Kaczynski had not agreed with the diagnosis and had pled guilty to the charges rather than allow his defense team to proceed with an insanity defense.
“I’m confident that I’m sane,” Kaczynski told Time magazine in 1999. “I don’t get delusions and so forth.”
He named by the FBI as the “Unabomber” due to his early target when seemed to be universities and airlines.
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