"Everyone needs to be killed,'' Omeed Aziz Popal calmly told officers as he sat in the back of a police car after a hit-and-run rampage that left one person dead in Fremont and 19 injured in San Francisco.Just why the 29-year-old unemployed automotive worker allegedly said that remains a mystery. His family says he is mentally ill.
But his comments, as recorded in police reports filed by three officers who spoke with Popal, suggest a level of planning that may belie claims of mental illness, authorities say.
Popal made his remarks to officers minutes after his sport utility vehicle was boxed in by police cruisers Tuesday afternoon outside a drugstore in the Laurel Heights neighborhood.
The windshield was smashed and the hood crumpled. In intersections and on sidewalks stretching for blocks east lay people who had been hit and injured by a Honda Pilot that went out of its way to run pedestrians down.
In Fremont, the body of 54-year-old Stephen Jay Wilson was under a tarp in the field where he landed after being rammed by a Honda Pilot as he walked in a bike lane. Authorities say he was Popal's first victim, and on Thursday prosecutors in Alameda County charged him with murder.
Popal was already accused of 18 counts of attempted murder and other felonies in San Francisco, where prosecutors will have first crack at him. The 19th injured person was a police officer who was in his cruiser when Popal allegedly struck it. Popal faces felony battery on a peace officer in connection with that injury.
Popal told San Francisco police that he had thought about killing people "since yesterday," according to one police report filed by an officer based at the Richmond District station.
The suspect's cousin, Hamid Nekrawesh, said Popal embarked on his rampage after he tricked his mother and sister into getting out out of his SUV shortly before noon Tuesday in Fremont and drove off.
Popal told one officer that he "wanted to come to San Francisco and kill people,'' and another officer that "everyone needs to be killed,'' the police reports said.
"I planned to kill those people I ran over last night -- they needed to be killed,'' Popal said at one point.
His antipathy for people, as portrayed in the police reports, was punctuated by particular hatred for his father. Relatives have said Popal's parents, with whom he still lives in Fremont, kept a close eye on him and allowed him little freedom because of what they described as his mental instability and their desire to shield him from "evil people."
Popal told San Francisco police that he wanted to kill his father, Najib Popal. He also said he had already killed his father by cutting off his hands.
Relatives say Omeed Popal has accompanied his father for years to garage sales and swap meets where the elder Popal sold refurbished appliances. Omeed Popal attended college at San Jose State and the former Cal State Hayward, had worked at the Nummi automotive plant in Fremont and at a local business that makes automated teller machines.
Father and son had quarreled in recent days over Omeed Popal's insistence on going back to Afghanistan, where he had traveled in July to marry a woman he had never met, Nekrawesh said. Popal's parents arranged the wedding.
Popal also told police he had hoped to kill a police officer during the hit-and-run rampage, but didn't see any, according to one police report.
The officers who spoke to Popal said he seemed rational and calm as he sat in the cruiser, offering lengthy and repetitive statements but never giving specific reason for going on the hit-and-run mission.
San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Jim Thompson quoted Popal's statements during a court hearing Thursday at which Superior Court Judge Donna Little ordered a psychiatric evaluation for Popal. He is being held in the psychiatric ward of San Francisco General Hospital.
Outside court, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said Popal suffers from serious mental illness and called the attacks a horrible tragedy.
Members of Popal's family have said he had been hospitalized at least twice this year for mental problems.
Family members attended the hearing but left without commenting, some covering their faces from television cameras. Adachi said Popal's mother, Zakia Aziz, and father were among those who went to court.
Also Thursday, Alameda County prosecutors charged Popal with one count of murder and an enhancement alleging that he used a car as a deadly and dangerous weapon in the hit-run death of Wilson, who was struck on Fremont Boulevard near Decoto Road.
Witnesses said the driver of the SUV that hit Wilson appeared to do so intentionally, "without even pausing or applying the brakes," said Assistant District Attorney Colton Carmine of Alameda County.
Carmine said that although statements by Popal's relatives could lay the foundation for a defense based on mental illness, "it's fairly beyond dispute that this person went to two universities in the Bay Area and had a large circle of college-educated friends.
"So this notion that this is a horrible American society is just infuriating to me. All I know is that he took advantage of this society, used the resources we make available and did this horrible thing where, only but the grace of God, there weren't additional murder victims in San Francisco."
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