Liberty Bell attacker broke his silence on this week in Philly history

The power of the nearly 300-year-old Liberty Bell lies in its inscription.

Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land

Unto all the inhabitants thereof

That Bible verse, Leviticus 25:10, is what turned the city’s broken bell into a powerful symbol for freedom fighters of every cause.

So it’s a bit ironic that on April 6, 2001, a dreadlock-bearded Mitch Guilliatt, who wanted to personally separate from the United States, hammered the icon with a 4-pound sledge.

Guilliatt wanted to talk with an Inquirer reporter in the spring of 2002, he said, because he didn’t think people understood why he did it.

On the front page of the May 13, 2002, edition of the newspaper, reporter Joe Slobodzian laid out the insight he gleaned in an interview with the 28-year-old Guilliatt, who had dropped out of college and was working odd jobs while living in Oregon.

He told the reporter that there was no moment of insight. The lightning bolt didn’t strike him.

Instead, it came after years of studying U.S. history and the Bible. And shortly after his father died from asthma.

At some point in early 2001, the Nebraska-born man decided that he needed to make a dramatic public declaration of his faith.

Something that would fully express what he felt was true and important about the teachings of God and Jesus Christ.

He wanted to make some noise, and he knew he would make the loudest in Philadelphia.

He never intended to damage the bell, or scare a group of fourth graders from New York, he told the Inquirer reporter.

“It’s a 2,000-pound bell,” he said, “and I believed I’d need something big enough to ring it.”

Seconds after striking the bell, leaving behind a few gouges, and screaming out, “God lives,” he was taken down by federal guards.

Guilliatt told the reporter in that 2002 interview that he “really didn’t know what would happen.”

Well, the federal government seemed to have an idea.

A federal judge appreciated his sincerity, but said he had to make an example out of Guilliatt for damaging “a national treasure.”

Guilliatt was given a mental evaluation, and found to be “cooperative, pleasant, and forthcoming.”

He pleaded guilty to damaging an archaeological resource and was sentenced to nine months in a prison halfway house and five years of court-supervised release, and he paid more than $7,000 to repair the marks left on the bell.

In a letter to the judge, Guilliatt’s mother said his father’s untimely death was most likely driving his search for religious meaning.

He “learned that the time for being a decent and caring person can be short,” she wrote. “The path that he has chosen [is] not always understood by others.”