A fire, a fascination with explosives and family discord marked path to clinic bombing

PALM SPRINGS — Long before Guy Bartkus’ personal war against life ended with him the sole suspect in blowing up a fertility clinic, and himself, there was a fascination with pyrotechnics.

In a stream of videos posted to a YouTube site that law enforcement officials say they believe belonged to Bartkus, only a single one fell in the genre of modern male youth: a war games video game clip.

The rest run through solitary experiments in chemistry, physics and explosives: A hydrogen balloon is set on fire. M-80s explode in the desert sand. A bucket of radioactive uranium ore sets a Geiger counter wailing.

In one video, a small tube of a “melt cast” explosive punches a deep socket into a heavy metal bar, detonating so loudly the sound rockets from one bouldered slope to another.

“Holy s—!,” a young man laughs in amazed delight.

It is the same voice captured on a 30-minute audio manifesto that investigators tie to Bartkus, in which he attempts to explain his animosity toward those who conceive children and seemingly his decision to attack a Palm Springs fertility clinic.

On Saturday morning, a bomb was detonated at American Reproductive Centers in Palm Springs, destroying much of the building, injuring four people and killing the bomber. Bartkus is the sole suspect in the bombing, which the FBI has labeled as domestic terrorism.

DNA tests of body parts found at the scene show Bartkus was killed in the blast. The FBI case investigators, as well as law enforcement sources, characterize the 25-year-old as having “nihilistic ideations,” conclusions drawn from social media postings they link to Bartkus.

In those public postings, Bartkus argued that procreation without consent of the unborn is unethical and unjustifiable in a world struggling with environmental harm, violence and overpopulation. Law enforcement sources told The Times that they are also looking into whether childhood trauma laid the foundation for his beliefs.

Bartkus’ father, who has not seen him in over a decade, told The Times he was unaware of his son’s extremist views.

“It’s like, this is not my son,” said Richard Bartkus, 75. “I haven’t seen him in 10 years, but I still know his heart. His heart was more for helping people, not destroying people.”

The full picture of Guy Edward Bartkus is far from complete. But an interview with his father, as well as legal filings in San Bernardino County Superior Court, offer a window into the discord that shadowed Bartkus’ upbringing. His childhood was touched by divorce, allegations of abuse and a keen early interest in explosives.

Little has been made public about his adult life — other than he held a string of short-term jobs, working on an electronics assembly line and as a school bus monitor for special needs children. Neither his mother or sister, with whom he reportedly lived in Twentynine Palms, could be reached for comment.

The online trail that authorities are scouring to glean some insight into Bartkus’ motives include a website that appears dedicated to the Palm Springs bombing. It features a 30-minute recording that site data indicates was uploaded at the time of the explosion, and promises a video — never posted — of the blast. There are also YouTube videos under a web alias associated with Bartkus, and threads on Reddit and a suicide forum.

In those, Bartkus voiced despondence over the death of a “best friend,” Sophie, a woman who lived in Washington who ran multiple social media sites espousing radical feminism, veganism and intentional suicide. She died in April, allegedly shot in the head by her partner. That man told police he was acting at her request.

In the end, grief may have played a part in Bartkus’ self-destruction.

“I won’t allow my brain to get over you, Sophie,” the bomber wrote in the hidden comment code of his website. “There’s no reason to anyways…”

Born in Waterbury, Conn., Bartkus moved to California with his family when he was about 1 1/2, according to his father. After settling in North Palm Springs, the family moved to Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley.

He was a curious boy who liked to experiment, the father said.

He told of returning to their Yucca Valley rental home one day and seeing his 9-year-old son hide something under the shed and hurry indoors. He assumed his son was just racing to beat him to the computer.

“But he had a little fire going,” said Richard Bartkus. “He pushed it under the shed, thinking that the sand would put it out. But it didn’t, it caught the shed on fire. And when the shed caught on fire, it spread to the house and burned the house down.”

He said his son took it hard.

“He felt really bad,” said Richard Bartkus. “For a while, he kind of shied away from everybody.”

In his teens, Guy Bartkus ramped up his experiments with stink bombs and rockets. His father said he became stricter with his son, worried that the fascination with explosives was getting out of hand.

“First of all, you start building small explosives,” he said. “Next thing you know, you want to go a little bigger. You’re making those little poppers. Next, you want to get a little louder. You start making these little rockets. But they only go so far. … Now you’re doing more of a homemade gunpowder. Before you know it, you just gone too far.”

Richard Bartkus said he and Guy’s mother, Dianne Bartkus, disagreed on how to handle their son.

Their family life appeared to become increasingly fractious.

In August 2012, Dianne Bartkus moved out of the family’s home with their two children. Soon after, she sought a restraining order against Richard Bartkus. In court documents, she described feeling “scared of his irrational behavior” and “threatened” by her husband.

In one instance, she alleged in court filings, Richard Bartkus visited her at the smoke shop where she worked and brought a sniper rifle. “If I catch you with another man within the next three months, I’ll shoot him 10 times in the head or between the eyes,” he allegedly said.

“His random behavior scares me and I am worried for the safety of my children,” she said in court documents.

The court files also include Richard Bartkus’ rebuttals of her allegations. He denied mistreating her or the children — “unless you call my yelling at them for the cuss words they use and nasty shows and music they watch and listen to abuse. I call it being a good parent.”

The court granted Dianne Bartkus’ request for a restraining order, but gave the father visitation rights. Guy was 13 at the time, and his sister, Regina, was 14.

In November 2013, Dianne Bartkus filed for divorce.

Richard Bartkus said he had not seen his son since a visit in 2014. He’d had a heart attack, he said, and his ex-wife and children came to feed him and drop off medication.

In a 2015 request to amend the restraining order to include the children, Dianne Bartkus said there had been “few visitations” between the father and children due to “emotional/verbal abuse.” She alleged Richard Bartkus had mocked his son’s sexuality — a charge he denied to The Times, saying his wife made up stories to make him look bad.

Still, in 2021, an Instagram account with the name Richard Bartkus publicly ridiculed Guy Bartkus for burning down the family home.

“Guy Bartkus decided he was smart enough to play with stick matches outside and burned down the whole house and everything in it, and now he thinks he is so smart and so perfect and never made any mistakes in life.”

Richard Bartkus told The Times he was responding to another post from his son, now deleted, accusing him of being too hard on his son.

“He was trying to come off like everything was my fault,” he said. “I tried to explain to him the reasons why I got so strict on him. He burned my house down! Me and my wife, my kids are in the house. You destroy all of our property by burning the whole house down. I’m gonna come down strict on you!”

Ultimately, Richard Bartkus said his son was “a good kid,” smart and inquisitive, who built his own computers at an early age. In high school, he said, his son got Cs and Ds, until he switched to the district’s independent study program. With one-on-one attention, he said, his son turned into an A and B student.

His son, he said, ended up graduating with honors from Yucca Valley High School. Richard Bartkus did not attend the graduation.

A screen shot from a YouTube page tied to Guy Edward Bartkus.

(YouTube)

In 2019, at 18, Guy Bartkus began to post videos of his desert explosions on a YouTube channel called “IndictEvolution.” The videos have since been taken down, but The Times was able to access them through an archival site. Law enforcement sources confirmed they have been linked to Bartkus.

Early on, the videos fall into the realm of hobbyist experiments: He exploded a small hydrogen balloon; he concocted glass beakers of acids. But by the time Bartkus was 24, his videos show him playing with some of the most dangerous explosives accessible to amateur hobbyists.

He demonstrates detonation of erythritol tetranitrate (ETN), characterized in scientific literature as nearly as powerful as plastic explosives used by the military. That year, the username on a gaming platform tied to Bartkus’ email address was “Pyrotechnical.”

In that same period, Bartkus’ rhetoric on alternative social media sites was dark.

“I would not acknowledge reproduction as a human right, but instead as a form of rape,” IndictEvolution wrote on Lemmy.World in July 2023. “I am also not bothered by infanticide as long as it is done humanely…”

A screen shot from a YouTube page tied to Guy Edward Bartkus.

(YouTube)

In early May, Bartkus engaged with a suicide discussion site, presenting data from his tests on ingesting weak doses of sodium nitrite or seeking to generate carbon monoxide within a car, alongside graphs and charts.

“I’m glad I’m an extremist,” he wrote. “Makes me WAY less tethered to this turd of a planet.”

He volunteered that he wanted to kill himself by strapping an explosive to his head, setting the timer for one hour and drugging himself to sleep. He said he lacked access to any drug stronger than codeine. Available explosives were not the problem.

Then on Thursday night, he reached out to the forum again. He said he planned to kill himself in his car, with a chemical reaction that would produce carbon monoxide, along with “some extra drama that I probably should not say haha.”

Times staff writers Libor Jany and Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.