Ted Bryar

"One hour, you have one hour to remove it, or I swear to God I'll kill every agent on this train."

Doctor Theodore "Ted" Bryar is a mentally unstable, murderous paranoid schizophrenic who appeared in Season One of Criminal Minds.

History
Ted has presumably suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for his whole life. As a result of the voices inside his head, he spent his childhood and adolescent years studying. He later became one of the world's top physicists, studying in particular the M-theory and writing hundreds of essays about it. He also worked for the U.S. government for several years in an unspecified position(s) during the 1980s, and was placed in the Stokes Mental Health Center in El Paso in 1996, presumably due to his schizophrenia growing more pronounced. His mental illness was treated by Linda Deaton, a psychiatrist. In "Derailed", she was bringing him to Dallas, Texas for a conference, as an example of the progress being made to relieve severe psychosis. During the train ride on the way there, someone jumped in front of the train, forcing the train to stop. This, coupled with him noticing Elle, who was reading FBI files, in a nearby seat, caused Ted to have a mental breakdown and, spurred by his imaginary friend Leo, he took a gun from a train security guard, fatally shot him, handcuffed Elle to her seat, took her gun as well, and held the passengers, including Elle and Deaton, hostage.

After two hours of trying to reason with him, the local authorities managed to convince Ted to let them place a telephone in the train car. Ted refused to speak to anyone but an operative of "The Higher Authority", a part of his schizophrenic delusions. Gideon called him and pretended to be as such. Ted then gave him an hour to send in a technician to remove "it", which the BAU later realized was an imaginary microchip that Ted believed caused the voices in his head. Reid suggested that he'd do a sleight of hand, hiding a regular chip in his hand, making a small cut in Ted's arm, and pretending to remove the chip. When Reid did so, however, Ted ordered him to "turn it on". Improvising, Reid and Elle claimed that the chip was powered by tiny electric impulses fired between neurons and had to be implanted to work. Since Ted's voices, logically, didn't go away, he held Reid on the train. Reid soon recognized Ted's behavior, having a schizophrenic mother, and managed to distract him long enough for Elle to drop-kick him, after which another passenger who had a concealed M1911A1 handgun shot him in the stomach. He was then taken away by paramedics, repeating "I'm sorry", presumably survived, and put into a mental institution.

Profile


The BAU instantly realized Ted was a psychotic, due to the fact that he appeared to suffer from tardive dyskinesia, a condition that causes uncontrollable facial tics, and which stems from years of antipsychotic usage. Extremely paranoid, Ted believed that the government or some other clandestine group was monitoring him, and as delusions are often shaped by personal experience, his years of work for the government were presumably what caused his fantasies. Ted's delusions manifested in the form of hallucinations, voices, and burning and buzzing sensations, which he believed were caused by chips implanted in his body, as his rants and the scars present on his arms indicated. Though he was suffering from a psychotic break, Ted's speech was still lucid, and showed no signs of neologisms, word salads or loosening of associations, meaning his thinking was still relatively organized. Ted's delusion were an important factor in diffusing the situation, and had to be played to, which the BAU did through several means, such as denying him information about who they were, making themselves appear more mysterious, and thus higher in authority to him.

Modus Operandi
Ted threatened, beat, and shot his hostages with a pair of 9mm handguns: one a Beretta 92FS stolen from the train security guard he killed and the other a Glock 19 taken from Elle.

Real-Life Comparison
Ted was presumably loosely based on Ralph Tortorici, a paranoid schizophrenic who held a university classroom hostage for several hours, claiming to have done so due to his belief that the government was monitoring him via implants under his skin.

Known Victims

 * The November 23, 2005 train standoff:
 * Unnamed security guard
 * Held five people hostage on the passenger train and intended to kill them. They are:
 * Elle Greenaway
 * Josh Patel
 * Elaine Curtis
 * Harry Anderson
 * Doctor Linda Deaton
 * Spencer Reid

Appearances

 * Season One
 * "Derailed"
 * "What Fresh Hell?"
 * Season Four
 * "Memoriam"