The man arrested with a firearm 370 meters from where former US President Donald Trump was playing golf in Florida this Sunday (15) was already convicted – more than 20 years ago – for illegal possession of a machine gun, according to the American press.
The former president suffered the second assassination attempt of the current campaign, after an individual, who was detained by the Secret Service and failed to shoot the Republican, approached his golf club with the weapon. The assailant was carrying an assault rifle with a telescopic sight.
The detainee is a 58-year-old man, very active on social media, named Ryan Wesley Routh, who lived in North Carolina and Hawaii, detailed the local press.
In 2002, according to court records seen by multiple media outlets, Routh was convicted of possession of a weapon of mass destruction: an automatic machine gun. The records also show convictions for “carrying a concealed weapon, possession of stolen property and hit-and-run,” as well as numerous traffic violations, crimes dating back to the 1980s.
According to the broadcaster NBCmore than 100 criminal charges have been filed against Ryan Routh in North Carolina.
The detainee’s son gave an interview to the broadcaster CNN stating that it is not typical of his father “to do something crazy, much less violent.”
“I don’t know what happened in Florida and I hope things were just blown out of proportion,” Routh’s son said.
Last year, Routh gave an interview to the newspaper New York Times about his involvement in Ukraine’s war against Russia. He visited the European country in 2022 to recruit Afghan fighters, he revealed in the interview, despite having no ties to the American military.
On social media, he also said weeks after the Russian invasion that he had a desire to “fight and die in Ukraine.”
The FBI has confirmed that what happened at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, is being investigated as an “apparent attempted murder.”
Trump had already been 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.
At that time, the Secret Service shot dead the attacker, who fired from a high place outside the premises, where a man who was among the rally supporters died from a gunshot wound.
The event led to numerous resignations due to security failures at the event, including that of then-Director of the U.S. Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle.
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