We Now Know the Cause of Ted Kaczynski's Death - It Wasn't Old Age: Report
Theodore Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber, killed himself in federal prison, according to a new report.
Kaczynski, who conducted an intermittent 17-year bombing spree ending in 1995, died early Saturday at a federal prison medical center in North Carolina, according to The New York Times. The Times cited “three people familiar with the situation” as its sources reporting that Kaczynski’s death was suicide.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons said emergency staff were summoned to Kaczynski’s cell at 12:23 a.m. Attempts to revive the 81-year-old at the prison and in an ambulance failed.
ABC News also reported that Kaczynski’s death was suspected to be a suicide.
The Times reported that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina conducts autopsies for inmates who die at the prison, located in Butner, North Carolina. It did not offer details of when Kaczynski’s autopsy might take place.
In reporting on Kaczynski’s death, the Times noted that “the self-inflicted death of another high-profile inmate, four years after the accused sex offender Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself at a Manhattan federal detention center, is certain to raise fresh questions about the quality of security, oversight and health care in the troubled, chronically understaffed federal prison system.”
Kaczynski arrived at the North Carolina prison in 2021, after spending 25 years at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
In 1995, a manifesto composed by the Unabomber was published by The New York Times and The Washington Post, ABC noted.
In a 2016 interview, according to ABC, Linda Patrik, Kaczynski’s sister-in-law, said she thought pieces of the manifesto sounded familiar but did not immediately act.
“I’d thought about the families that were bombed,” she told the program “20/20 on ID Presents: Homicide.”
“There was one in which the package arrived to the man’s home and his little 2-year-old daughter was there. She was almost in the room when he opened the package. Luckily she left, and his wife left. And then he died. And there were others. And so I spent those days thinking about those people,” she said.
She said she told David Kaczynski, her husband and the bomber’s brother. They ultimately passed along their thoughts to the FBI.
“When she said, ‘Well, I think maybe your brother’s the Unabomber,’ I thought, ‘Well, this is not anything to worry about. Ted’s never been violent. I’ve never seen him violent.’ I couldn’t imagine that he would do what the Unabomber had done,” David Kaczynski said in 2016.
In his manifesto, Kaczynski said science was putting the human race in peril, as The Washington Post noted.
That point of view received an affirmation from Twitter owner Elon Musk.
He might not be wrong
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 10, 2023
“Science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race,” Kaczynski wrote in his manifesto.
“Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications … how could one argue against any of these things? [Yet] all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands … but in those of politicians, corporate executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence,” he wrote.
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