


Colorado state police on Tuesday arrested a man who allegedly broke into the state’s supreme court building overnight and opened fire inside the building.
The incident, which came two weeks after the Colorado court ruled former president Donald Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s 2024 ballot in a 4-3 decision, took almost two hours to control.
According to police, the suspect was involved in a two-car crash near the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center, shot out one of the courthouse’s windows, and entered the building. He then held an unarmed security guard at gunpoint, took the guard’s keys, and then roamed the halls of the courthouse, ultimately firing more shots. The suspect called the police nearly two hours later and surrendered to law enforcement, which had set up a perimeter outside the building.
Colorado state troopers said the incident does not appear to be related to earlier threats made against the court’s justices, though motives for the break-in are as yet unknown.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations has worked with local law enforcement in recent weeks to determine the sources and veracity of such threats, which have reportedly included messages calling for the justices’ personal information to be released and instances of “swatting.” The latter is the practice of placing deceptive calls to emergency service response teams to compel them to send a police unit — often a SWAT team, as the term suggests — or paramedics to a location at which no incident has occurred.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision — which held that the former president is disqualified from holding the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution — is stayed until January 4 pending appeal. Trump’s campaign has indicated it will appeal the decision.