John Fitzgerald Byers/Pre-Gunmen

John Fitzgerald Byers was born on November 22, 1963, to parents who, before JFK's assassination, had planned to call him "Bertram", after his father. 
As a child, John learned from his father about JFK, Camelot, the idea of a government as good as its people and the American dream. He would ultimately form the opinion that those stories made him believe in the promise of his country and that they transformed him into the person he eventually became. 
By 1974, John had become a student at a school in Sterling, Virginia. While most of the other children in his class wanted to eventually grow up to become rich and famous, John wanted to ultimately be a career bureaucrat with the federal government. He also wanted to help as many people as he could and work hard to spread democracy throughout the world. One day, he and other members of his class each individually admitted their ambitions to their classmates, an exercise supervised by their female teacher. John, wearing a brown suit and tie, was more smartly dressed than most or all of his classmates. 
John loved the television show Gentle Ben, whose main character, also named Gentle Ben, was a grizzly bear. He wanted to have Gentle Ben as his pet and wished he could hug the animal, even though he couldn't have reached around the bear's huge furry neck.
When he was twelve, John saw a real grizzly bear while camping with his family. The bear, which was a rogue male, petrified John, who watched with his family as the animal overturned a dumpster the size of a car. Because the bear wouldn't leave, the park rangers, who were supervising the area where John and his family were camping, had to shoot the creature. As the bear lay on the ground afterwards, John looked at the animal and realized that, once the male rogue was gone, there would be no more like him. 
Byers later attended college, where he shared a room with fellow male student Carl Strode. During his college years, Byers briefly knew Carl's brother, Jeff Strode, who was a computer hacker. 
Category:John Byers