Employees of Discovery Communications hadn’t heard much from James J. Lee in the last two years. For a brief spell in early 2008, Lee was a fixture outside the company’s Silver Spring headquarters, leading a bizarre protest aimed at forcing the television giant to alter its programming. When his week-long spectacle ended in an arrest for disorderly conduct, Lee headed to a courthouse in Montgomery County as his own lawyer and quietly slipped out of the company’s consciousness.
When the 43-year-old finally returned today around 1 p.m., Lee came with a gun in his hand, a possible explosive device strapped to his body, and a list of demands that made sense only to himself. He walked into the company’s lobby brandishing his gun, starting a four-hour standoff full of fear and negotiations, with co-workers and loved ones hanging desperately on every update from police.
Lee never moved beyond the company’s lobby. He immediately took three people hostage — two of them Discovery Channel staffers, the third a security guard. Once it became clear something was amiss, the 1,900 employees either hunkered down in their offices or headed to the building’s side exits and out into the streets.
The building went into lockdown, the Montgomery County police arrived on the scene and cordoned off the area, and Discovery managers sent out an e-mail: “URGENT: Employees Should Go Home - Don't Return to 1DP Until Further Notice. Employees at 1DP should go home for the remainder of the day. No employee should return to 1DP for any reason.” The roughly 100 children at Discovery Kids Place, the company’s day care center, were ushered by their teachers to a nearby McDonald’s.
Discovery staffers texted and e-mailed one another in a flurry of confusion. The situation was shocking and bizarre. There are plenty of government buildings around Washington to attract angry extremists, but who could hold a potentially violent grudge against Discovery?
“It took all of us by surprise,” says one employee, who was set to work at the office that evening. (Employees were instructed not to talk the press, which explains why staffers quoted in this story requested anonymity.) The company, she says, is quite good about keeping employees abreast of any controversy or demonstrations----like earlier this year, when some people protested against Discovery’s plans for a reality show featuring Sarah Palin. There’d been nothing of the sort in recent weeks.
But the situation made a little more sense when the press aired a loose description of the perpetrator. “When I came in to talk to one of my supervisors, we had the TV on,” says another employee who works in a separate building. “There was a crawl at the bottom of the screen saying the suspect had been identified as an Asian male. We said, ‘That’s got to be the guy who was protesting a couple of years ago.’ And an hour or so later they confirmed it.” The employee says he hadn’t seen or thought of Lee in more than two years.
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