Suspect in Pelosi Attack Was Consumed by Conspiracy Theories, Boss Says

SAN FRANCISCO — About six years ago, David DePape was down on his luck, living under a tree in a park and hanging around outside a lumber store in Berkeley, Calif., looking for work.

“You know how people sit outside and wait for someone to come and offer them work?” recalled Frank Ciccarelli, a carpenter who builds houses and makes furniture. “He was sitting there. So I picked him up. So he started working for me. And he really worked out well.”

For the next several years Mr. Ciccarelli became close to Mr. DePape, even as he worked less and seemed to spend more time online, immersed in right-wing conspiracy theories — right up until a week ago, when he paid Mr. DePape his most recent wages.

Mr. DePape, 42, on Tuesday pleaded not guilty in a brief appearance in a San Francisco courtroom to several state felony charges after investigators say he broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week in the well-to-do Pacific Heights neighborhood and bludgeoned her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. Mr. DePape also faces federal charges of attempting to kidnap Ms. Pelosi and assaulting a relative of a federal official that were outlined in a complaint filed on Monday.

Investigators say Mr. DePape was on a mission to take Ms. Pelosi hostage, interrogate her and break her kneecaps if she “lied” to him. The speaker, the nation’s third most powerful political figure, was in Washington at the time of the attack.

The police said the case was politically motivated, and it has heightened fears of political violence ahead of the midterm elections, amid a surge in threats to lawmakers across the country that officials have blamed on the intense proliferation of conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric circulating in right-wing social media.

Mr. DePape was assigned a public defender, Adam Lipson, to represent him. In comments after Tuesday’s court appearance, Mr. Lipson said he first met his client on Monday evening; Mr. DePape was recently moved to the county jail from a hospital, where he was treated for a dislocated shoulder he sustained during the arrest.

Mr. Lipson promised to mount a “vigorous defense” and signaled that one possible strategy could be to highlight his client’s “vulnerability” to the misinformation and conspiracy theories that have become so prominent in American political life.

Mr. Ciccarelli, 76, described Mr. DePape as a quiet person and a diligent worker — an easygoing guy, at least until the topic of politics came up.

“We were together four or five days a week, four or five hours a day, a lot of times an hour in the car, going back and forth from jobs,” Mr. Ciccarelli said. “I think I know him better than anyone does.”

Over the six years he has known Mr. DePape, Mr. Ciccarelli said, he witnessed a transformation from a shy and hardworking, but troubled, man into someone who was increasingly isolated and captive to his darkest thoughts.

“If you got him talking about politics, it was all over,” Mr. Ciccarelli recalled in an interview this week. “Because he really believed in the whole MAGA, ‘Pizzagate,’ stolen election — you know, all of it, all the way down the line. If you go to Fox News, if you go on the internet and you look at QAnon, you know, he had all these theories.”

Mr. DePape’s sympathies for the most extreme right-wing conspiracy theories are one piece of the growing investigation into his background.

On Monday, Mr. DePape was charged with multiple state and federal felonies, including the attempted murder of Mr. Pelosi, 82, who remains at a local hospital after undergoing surgery. In a statement on Monday, Ms. Pelosi said her husband, “is making steady progress on what will be a long recovery process.”

Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s district attorney, said she would ask at Tuesday’s arraignment that Mr. DePape be held in jail without bail. It was not immediately clear who was representing him.

For a time, Mr. DePape, who grew up in British Columbia in Canada and moved to California about two decades ago to pursue a relationship with a woman he had met in Hawaii, seemed to be living the life of a Bay Area hippie, making hemp jewelry and attending protests against a ban on public nudity in San Francisco. For a time, he house-sat for a woman in the East Bay area who ran an urban farm for low-income residents, and sometimes helped take care of the chickens.

And from 2002 to 2009, Mr. DePape was registered to vote in San Francisco County and declared himself affiliated with the Green Party, according to county records that showed he voted once, in 2002. He attested to being eligible to vote.

But in the years leading up to the attack on the Pelosi family, Mr. DePape seemed to be spending more and more time in the darkest corners of the internet, according to Mr. Ciccarelli. After working together for a few years, Mr. Ciccarelli helped Mr. DePape get away from the streets, moving him into a friend’s garage studio in Richmond, Calif.

“Once he was housed, he had much more time to spend on his computer,” Mr. Ciccarelli said. “Because when you’re living under a tree, you don’t have a plug. You just have a battery.”

On Saturday, the F.B.I. raided the garage in Richmond and seized two hammers, a sword and a pair of gloves.

As he spent more time on his computer in recent months, Mr. DePape appeared to have produced a voluminous record of his political leanings — ranting about the 2020 election being stolen, appearing to deny the gassing of Jews at Auschwitz and claiming that schoolteachers were grooming children to be transgender. He also targeted the media in one post, arguing that any journalist who said the 2020 election was not stolen to deny former President Donald J. Trump a new term “should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.” Mr. DePape’s blog was registered at the Richmond address where he resided.

He reposted videos about right-wing themes, including those celebrating people who had not been vaccinated, mixed in with messages about buying survivalist food supplies and gold. A post on Thursday, the day before the attack on the Pelosi residence, denounced the new superhero movie “Black Adam” for its “wokism,” and claimed it was about finding an excuse to depict “killing with people in all white nations.” In another post from last week, he showed an antisemitic video and suggested Jews had manipulated Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, into destroying Ukraine so they could buy up its land cheaply.

Mr. Ciccarelli, who said he was scheduled to work with Mr. DePape on Monday, said he never heard Mr. DePape make racist comments, but said he had become increasingly isolated the last few years and wanted to work less in the carpentry business.

“He was completely caught up in the fantasy, in the MAGA fantasy,” he said.

Over the last few days, Mr. Ciccarelli has struggled to make sense of the news about his friend. “He did a monstrous thing, but he’s not a monster,” he said. “He’s really decent, gentle — it sounds crazy to say gentle — but he was a very gentle soul. But he was going downhill. He went down the rabbit hole.”

Charlie Savage, Alan Feuer and Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.