LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Washington state man who was charged with aiding the bomber of a fertility clinic in Southern California has died in federal custody just weeks after his arrest, prison officials said Tuesday.
Daniel Park, 32, was accused of supplying chemicals to Guy Edward Bartkus of California, the bomber, who died in the May 17 explosion.
The two men connected in fringe online forums over their shared beliefs against human procreation, investigators said. The blast gutted the clinic in Palm Springs, east of Los Angeles, and shattered the windows of nearby buildings, with officials calling the attack terrorism. The facility was closed, and no embryos were damaged.
Park, of suburban Seattle, was found unresponsive at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles Tuesday morning and was pronounced dead at a hospital, the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement. No cause of death was provided.
Park shipped 180 pounds (about 82 kilograms) of ammonium nitrate to Bartkus in January and bought another 90 pounds (about 41 kilograms) and had it shipped to him days before the explosion, investigators said. Park purchased ammonium nitrate online in several transactions between October 2022 and May 2025, according to a federal complaint.
Authorities said Park traveled to Twentynine Palms, California, near Palm Springs, to experiment with them in the bomber’s garage months before the attack.
Three days before Park visited him in January, Bartkus asked an AI chat application about explosives, detonation velocity, diesel and gasoline mixtures, the complaint said. The discussion centered on how to create the most powerful blast.
Park was taken into custody at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, after he was extradited from Poland, where he fled four days after the attack. Park had been charged with providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, which is prosecuting the case, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking details about Park’s death.
Park and Bartkus bonded over a “shared belief that people shouldn’t exist,” Akil Davis, the FBI’s assistant director in charge, said earlier this month.
They believed in anti-natalism, a fringe theory that opposes childbirth and population growth and contends that people should not continue to procreate. Officials said Bartkus intentionally targeted the American Reproductive Centers, a clinic that provides services to help people get pregnant, including in vitro fertilization and fertility evaluations.
Park appeared to be a frequent poster in an anti-natalist Reddit forum going back nearly a decade, according to court papers. In 2016, he spoke of recruiting others to the movement, which he described as hopeful.
According to court papers, he wrote: “When people are lost and distraught, death is always an option.”
Relatives told federal investigators that Park had made “pro-mortalist” statements since high school, according to the complaint.
More recently, in March, he posted in the forum to say he was seeking to find fellow anti-natalists in and around Washington state to “start some protests or just any in-person events,” according to court papers. The post did not receive any public comments.
___
Durkin Richer reported from Washington, D.C.
