On Sunday afternoon, Secret Service members engaged a gunman who was found outside former President Donald Trump’s Trump International Golf Club pointing a high-powered rifle at the course where the GOP was playing a round of golf.
The suspected gunman has since been identified by the authorities as Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, who police say was planning to attack the former president while he played a round of golf.
Routh was armed with an AK-47-style rifle and was allegedly within 500 yards of Trump when members of Trump’s Secret Service detail spotted him, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw shared on Sunday.
The suspect was a few holes from where the president was golfing at the time, and after spotting the threat, the Secret Service members opened fire at Routh, law enforcement officials shared.
At this time, it remains unclear if Routh returned fire at the protection detail.
Bradshaw said that witnesses saw a man jumping out of the bushes and fleeing in a Black Nissan. After retrieving the license plate number, the car was pulled over about 50 miles north of the golf course, and the driver was detained before later being identified as the suspect.
Officials retrieved the rifle, a scope, two backpacks with ceramic tile, and a GoPro camera in the bushes where Routh was hiding before he fled.
CNN reports that Routh is a self-employed affordable housing builder in Hawaii, though he has lived in North Carolina.
A neighbor of Routh in Greensboro, North Carolina, where Routh is registered as an “unaffiliated” voter, told Fox 8 that he always seemed “a little cuckoo” to them.
“I mean, I didn’t think he would go that far. I knew he was a little cuckoo, but assassinating the president? I mean, he’s going to be going away for a long time,” the neighbor said.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections reported that Routh voted in the state’s Democratic primary in March of this year.
The alleged gunman has been linked to an X account, which has since been suspended, where he posted about the assassination attempt on Trump at a rally in July in Pennsylvania.
“You and Biden should visit the injured people in the hospital from the Trump rally and attend the funeral of the murdered fireman. Trump will never do anything for them,” he wrote in a post directed at Vice President Harris.
He has also posted several other times about Trump, including one where he said Trump should change his slogan to “MASA,” which he said stands for “…make Americans slaves again master. DEMOCRACY is on the ballot, and we cannot lose.”
Though, he did say in a post from June 2020 that he voted for Trump in 2016 before changing his mind about the former president.
“While you were my choice in 2106 [sic], I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment, and it seems you are getting worse and devolving,” Routh wrote. “I will be glad when you gone.”
The woman who lived next to Routh for nearly two decades told Fox 8 that he “had a lot of guns” and that “a lot of people were afraid of him back in the day.”
Records from North Carolina show that in 2002, Routh was arrested after he was pulled over by police and then allegedly put his hand on a firearm before barricading himself in a business, the Greensboro News & Record reported at the time.
Several public records revealed he was involved in several court cases in the 1990s. He was also accused of failing to pay his taxes repeatedly by state and federal authorities.
In a text to CNN from his eldest son, Oran, Routh was described as a “loving and caring father, and honest, hardworking man.”
“I don’t know what’s happened in Florida, and I hope things have just been blown out of proportion because, from the little I’ve heard, it doesn’t sound like the man I know to do anything crazy, much less violent,” Oran Routh said in the text.