The suspect in an apparent attempt to assassinate Donald Trump was charged today with possessing a firearm as a felon and having a gun with its serial number erased. The first carries a 15-year prison sentence. Here are live updates.
Cellphone data indicated that Ryan Routh, 58, was in the woods near Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., for roughly 12 hours before a Secret Service agent spotted what appeared to be the barrel of a rifle and opened fire. The suspect fled the scene, leaving behind a semiautomatic rifle, and was arrested later.
Routh never had Trump in his sightline, and did not fire his weapon, said Ronald Rowe, the acting Secret Service director.
He was previously arrested in 2002 in Greensboro, N.C., after he barricaded himself inside a building with a fully automatic weapon. Records show that he was convicted of “possessing a weapon of mass death and destruction,” a felony. In 2019, he was investigated by the F.B.I. based on a tip that he was in possession of a firearm.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff, The Times’s Ukraine correspondent, interviewed Routh for a 2023 article about American volunteers fighting in Ukraine. The man had wanted to fly Afghan veterans to fight Russia. He was, Thomas writes, “in way over his head.” This is what we know about Routh.
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