Henry's Pub hostage incident

In the early morning of September 28, 1990, Mehrdad Dashti, a 29-year-old Iranian-born man with schizophrenia, entered Henry's Pub, located inside the Hotel Durant in Berkeley, California, near the University of California, Berkeley campus. At about 12:30 a.m., he brought three guns and 445 rounds of ammunition into the bar and took 33 people hostage, holding them for approximately seven hours.

During the standoff, Dashti made a series of irrational and delusional demands to police negotiators. These included asking for trillions of dollars from the federal government in exchange for telepathy services, demanding to be given the state of Alaska, and insisting that then-San Francisco Police Chief Frank Jordan and former CIA director Richard Helms publicly make statements, appear on television, and drop their pants. Dashti also ordered some blonde female students to undress below the waist and directed sexually demeaning language at them. He told hostages to "drink up," reportedly saying that if they were all going to die, they might as well be having fun.

By approximately 7 a.m., police negotiators had been unable to persuade Dashti to disarm, and officers decided to enter the premises. During the ensuing confrontation, a student, John N. Sheehy, age 22, was shot in the chest at close range and killed. Six other students and one police officer were wounded by gunfire. Dashti fired two shots at the kitchen door before police shot and killed him.

This case is documented in a single detailed Wikipedia account of the incident. Two additional contemporaneous sources — a New York Times article published the same day and a document hosted in the CIA's reading room — are referenced by the Wikipedia article but were not available in full text for this dossier; their contents could not be independently verified or drawn upon beyond their citation.