‘ I’m a warrior for the babies’
The loner accused of killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic confessed in a courtroom outburst on Wednesday that he committed the crime.
“I’m guilty. There’s no trial. I’m a warrior for the babies!” Robert Lewis Dear, 57, yelled before he was formally charged with firstdegree murder and other counts in a Colorado Springs courtroom.
Dear — who also wounded nine others — also repeatedly interrupted his lawyer, public defender Daniel King, and objected to King’s attempts to limit publicity in the case.
“You’ll never know what I saw in that clinic. Atrocities. The babies. That’s what they want to seal,” Dear bellowed.
King — who also represented Colorado theater shooter James Holmes — had asked the judge to impose a gag order on those involved in the Planned Parenthood case before a trial.
When lawyers talked about the victims who were wounded in the attack, Dear barked, “Could you add the babies that were to be aborted that day? Can you add that to the list?”
Dear also bizarrely claimed that the lawyer “drugged” Holmes, and that “he wants to do that to me” in outbursts that were his first public comments in the case.
Holmes was on antipsychotic medication during his trial in the 2012 shootings that killed 12 people and wounded 70. He was sentenced to life in prison.
“Do you know who this lawyer is?” Dear shouted to the stunned courtroom. “He’s the lawyer for the Batman shooter. Who drugged him all up. And he wants to do that to me.”
During the tumultuous hearing, King also questioned whether Dear was competent to stand trial.
“We don’t know the depth of his mental illness,” King said. “Serious concerns of competency.”
Colorado Springs cops have declined to identify a motive for the Nov. 27 attack, but Dear’s own damning words seemed to leave little doubt that he was motivated by his antiabortion zealotry.
Even before his outbursts Wednesday, he had muttered “no more body parts” after he was arrested, a reference to discredited allegations that Planned Parenthood clinics had illegally sold fetal body parts for research.
The bearded, wildhaired loner has lived in remote shacks without electricity or water and was known to consider himself a survivalist.
And one of his three exwives, Barbara Mescher Micheau of Moncks Corner, SC, said he glued the locks shut at a South Carolina abortion clinic at least 20 years earlier.
Dear’s victims included Garrett Swasey, 44, a University of ColoradoColorado Springs police officer who rushed to the scene; Ke’Arre Stewart, 29, an Iraq war veteran who was accompanying someone at the clinic and Jennifer Markovsky, 35, who also was with a a friend.