Florida and the FBI will investigate the attack on Donald Trump as an assassination attempt against the former president
The former president was targeted on Sunday in what the FBI describes as an “alleged assassination attempt” at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Just nine weeks after the Republican presidential candidate survived another attempt on his life.
The former president suffered his second assassination attempt this summer on Sunday. After an individual, who was detained by the Secret Service and did not fire at the leader, approached the golf course where the Republican was playing, armed with an AK-47 rifle with a telescopic sight.
Florida will conduct its own investigation into the assassination attempt
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said this Sunday that the state will carry out its own investigation into the assassination attempt on the former president and Republican candidate for the White House, Donald Trump, at the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach.
The golf game was not on the former president’s schedule, so investigators are also looking into how this individual knew the former president was there and how he managed to get within 500 yards of where the former president and presidential candidate was located.
Secret Service agents were moving back and forth behind the cart carrying the former president when they spotted a semiautomatic rifle barrel protruding from a fence near the golf course owned by Trump.
Without losing a second, the official security detail fired at who is believed to be Routh.
Routh abandoned his rifle with a telescopic sight, two backpacks, and a GoPro camera, then got into his black Nissan truck to flee the crime scene.
At that moment, a neighbor from the area took a photo of the main suspect and made it available to local authorities.
The subject was arrested on northbound I-95 by Martin County authorities.
The individual detained for the alleged assassination attempt on Sunday against the former president and Republican candidate for the White House, Donald Trump, had been convicted over 20 years ago for possession of a machine gun, according to local media.
PHOTO:AFP / EFE/Martin County Sheriff
What is known about the suspect:
The detainee is a 58-year-old man very active on social media named Ryan Wesley Routh, who has lived in North Carolina and Hawaii, according to local media.
The former construction contractor was arrested in a truck as he attempted to flee on Interstate 95 while the former president’s security detail found a semiautomatic AK rifle, two backpacks, and a portable GoPro camera at the crime scene.
In 2002, according to court records accessed by several media outlets, he was convicted of possessing a weapon of mass destruction: a fully automatic machine gun.
Records also show convictions for carrying a concealed weapon, possession of stolen property, and hit-and-run.
Ryan Wesley Routh has no military training, although he tried to recruit volunteers to fight against Russian forces that invaded Ukraine. “I am willing to fly to Kraków and go to the border with Ukraine to volunteer, fight, and die,” Routh posted on X (formerly Twitter) in early 2022.
According to NBC, more than 100 criminal charges have been filed against Ryan Routh in North Carolina.
The suspect’s son told CNN that it is not like his father “to do something crazy, much less violent.” “I don’t know what happened in Florida, and I hope things have simply been exaggerated,” he told the outlet.
According to CNN, Routh was heavily involved in the war in Ukraine against Russia and visited the European country in 2022.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed that what happened at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, is being investigated as an apparent “assassination attempt.”
Trump was the victim of an assassination attempt on July 13 during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, after a 20-year-old man shot him with a rifle, wounding him in the right ear.
The Secret Service killed the attacker, who fired from an elevated position outside the venue, where one attendee died from a gunshot wound.
The incident led to numerous resignations due to security failures at the event, including that of the then-director of the U.S. Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle.
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