Daniel Park, the accused accomplice in the Palm Springs fertility clinic bombing, died by suicide inside a downtown Los Angeles federal detention center, according to new reporting from the Los Angeles Times.
Citing two sources familiar with the investigation, the Times reports that Park, 32, fatally jumped from a high interior balcony at the Metropolitan Detention Center around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. He was found unresponsive by staff and taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Officials have not publicly confirmed the cause of death. The L.A. County Medical Examiner’s Office has yet to release an official ruling, and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has said only that Park was discovered unresponsive and that life-saving efforts were unsuccessful. TMZ was first to report the death as a suspected suicide.
Park had been in federal custody less than two weeks after his arrest at New York’s JFK International Airport on June 4. Authorities say he was returning from Poland, where he fled days after the May 17 bombing that killed 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus and injured four others.
Bartkus was the suspected bomber who detonated an explosive outside the American Reproductive Centers in Palm Springs, causing widespread damage but sparing the reproductive materials stored inside.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Park supplied Bartkus with more than 270 pounds of ammonium nitrate – a key chemical used in explosives – and visited him in Twentynine Palms earlier this year. The FBI says Park shared Bartkus’ antinatalist ideology, which asserts that people should not exist because they were born without consent.
Park was indicted earlier this month on charges of malicious destruction of property and providing material support to a terrorist. According to court filings, six packages of ammonium nitrate were traced back to shipments from Park in Washington state.
He was being held in pretrial detention and had not yet entered a plea. The FBI and U.S. Marshals Service are investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.
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