What to Know About Ryan Routh, Charged With Attempting to Assassinate Trump

Ryan Wesley Routh was charged by a grand jury on Sept. 24 with attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump, adding to gun-related charges already leveled against him for his alleged involvement in a Sept. 15 incident at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Although the investigation is still underway, social media posts and past interviews paint the 58-year-old alleged gunman as a vocal Trump supporter-turned-critic who was particularly passionate about defending Ukraine in its war against Russia and sought to recruit volunteers to fight in Ukraine. Public records show he also has a history of criminal convictions, some of which would have barred him from owning a gun.

Routh was taken into police custody on Sept. 15 after a Secret Service agent saw a man allegedly crouched outside Trump’s golf course with a rifle while the Republican presidential nominee was playing about 400 yards away. After Secret Service personnel fired shots, the suspect fled and Routh was later arrested.

The latest indictment adds three new counts—attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate, possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, and assaulting a federal officer—to the charges outlined in an earlier federal criminal complaint: possessing a firearm despite being a felon and possessing a firearm with a wiped-out serial number. The maximum prison sentences, if convicted, on each charge, respectively, are: up to life, at least seven years, up to 20 years, up to 15 years, and up to five years. Routh, who is represented by a public defender, remains in custody without bail.

Here’s what is known so far about Routh.

Hawaii-based construction worker

Routh, according to a LinkedIn profile, has since 2018 been the owner of Camp Box Honolulu, which according to the company’s website specializes in constructing mobile and towable units, storage sheds, off-grid bathrooms, and other small structures across the island of Oahu. According to the LinkedIn profile, Routh focused on “simple economical structures to help address the highest homelessness rate in the United States,” and a 2019 report in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser said he donated a tiny house for the homeless.

Routh previously lived in North Carolina and was a 1998 graduate of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, according to LinkedIn.

A criminal record

Routh has had several run-ins with the law over the years.

In 2002, Routh was charged and convicted in North Carolina for possession of a weapon of mass destruction, Special Agent in Charge Jeffrey Veltri of the FBI Miami Field Office said in a press conference on Sept. 16. Veltri also said Routh was the subject of a closed investigation over a 2019 tip to the FBI alleging that he was a felon in possession of a firearm. (The FBI was unable to verify the complaint and passed the info to local law enforcement in Hawaii.)

Veltri also confirmed that Routh “had numerous felony charges for stolen goods” from 1997 to 2010. According to the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, a man with his name and date of birth was convicted several times for a number of offenses including multiple counts of possessing stolen goods in 2010. There is no record of time spent incarcerated, according to the state records, which indicated Routh was sentenced to probation for each conviction.

In 2003, he was convicted of consolidated charges including hit and run, carrying a concealed weapon, resisting an officer, and possessing a weapon of mass destruction in 2002. Local newspaper Greensboro News & Record reported at the time that Routh, then 36 and whose drivers’ license had previously been revoked, was pulled over during a traffic stop but put his hand on a firearm and drove away to a store, where he barricaded himself for three hours. The “weapon of mass destruction” charge, the paper reported, referred to a fully automatic machine gun.

According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hawaii police have records of four interactions with Routh, including being removed from a property in 2019 for alleged squatting and reporting that he was an assault victim in 2021, when he claimed that a resident of a property that he was working at as a handyman punched him in the nose (no arrests were made).

He once supported Trump

Routh’s politics do not appear consistently aligned with one party or the other.

According to public voter records at the North Carolina State Board of Elections, Routh was registered as an unaffiliated voter without a party in Guilford County in 2012. In March 2024, he voted in the state’s Democratic primary.

Federal Election Commission filings show that Routh donated more than $140 to Act Blue, the Democratic fundraising platform, between September 2019 and March 2020.

Routh said he voted for Trump in 2016, according to a June 2020 post on his X (formerly Twitter) account, which has since been suspended: “@realDonaldTrump 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,” he wrote. “I will be glad when you gone.”

Another X post on Jan. 8, 2024, shows that Routh called on then Republican primary candidate Nikki Haley to team up with other Republican primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to “create a winning ticket now that we all can get behind.” Other previous posts showed support for former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat turned Trump supporter.

When Trump was shot during a previous assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania in July, Routh posted on X tagging President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris urging them to visit the rally-goer victims: “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.”

Routh had previously thought about the idea of a Trump assassination in what appears to be a self-published e-book in 2023. In a section about Iran, Routh apologized to the Middle East nation for having previously voted for Trump, whom Routh described as a “retarded child” and said “ended up being brainless” for dismantling the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. “I am man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake,” Routh wrote. “You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment.”

“No one here in the U.S. seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work,” he added, “or even unnatural selection.”

Read More: Iran, Trump, and the Third Assassination Plot

A website—voteryanrouth.com—appears to have been set up in early July with a series of blog posts outlining a potential run for Honolulu mayor, in which the admin (whose phone number and self-descriptions match those of Routh) shared his musings on more than 60 topics from homelessness (“When I visit the dog quarantine facility I think to myself that I could live in one of those kennels, as they are nice. We provide better facilities for our dogs than we do for our homeless. We cannot be afraid to provide minimalist shelter for those that cannot afford a place”) to “global issues” (“Our presidents must befriend leaders of Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and any rogue countries such as Myanmar to create partnerships to slowly influence their policies towards making their citizens lives better”).

Appears to have planned the attack

Prosecutors wrote in a detention memo that a witness received a box several months ago from Routh but did not open it until after hearing of the attempt on Trump’s life. Upon opening, the unidentified witness found ammunition, a metal pipe, building materials, tools, four phones, and various letters.

One letter, which the witness photographed and was included in the memo, was addressed “Dear World,” and read: “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I am so sorry I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job.”

Prosecutors also pointed to cell-phone records that showed Routh traveled from Greensboro, N.C., to West Palm Beach on Aug. 14, and that between Aug. 18 and the date of the assassination attempt, Routh’s phone was detected near the golf course and near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

Prosecutors said that in Routh’s vehicle, authorities found a handwritten list of dates and places that Trump was present or was expected to appear, as well as a passport and six phones, one of which contained “a Google search of how to travel from Palm Beach County to Mexico.”

Got involved in the war in Ukraine

Posts on Routh’s Facebook and X accounts—both of which have been taken down—displayed strong support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, and he even appears to have traveled across the world to support the effort, for which he once posted that he was willing to “fight and die.”

“We need to burn the Kremlin to the ground and put an end to Putin and Russia,” he wrote on X, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A since-taken down 2022 GoFundMe page by Hawaii-based Kathleen Shaffer—identified on the fundraising request as Routh’s fiancée (and reported to share an address with Routh in Kaaawa, Hawaii, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser)—said Routh had gone to Kyiv in April of that year and that he planned “on staying for at least 90 days.”

In an interview from Ukraine with Newsweek Romania in June 2022, Routh explained why he had gone to the embattled country himself. “To me, a lot of the other conflicts are gray, but this conflict is definitely black and white,” Routh said. “This is about good versus evil. This is a storybook, you know, any movie we’ve ever watched, this is definitely evil against good.”

Routh spoke with Semafor in March 2023, when he identified himself as the self-appointed head of the International Volunteer Center, a group he set up in Ukraine to connect foreigners with military units and aid groups, and he complained of Ukraine’s reluctance to admit foreign soldiers. Routh also spoke to the New York Times in 2023 about potentially using illegal means to recruit Afghan soldiers who left the Taliban to join the fight in Ukraine. The Times reporter has since recounted that Routh said he never fought himself in the conflict because he felt he was too old and has no military experience. Ukraine’s International Legion, a military unit commonly known as the foreign legion, said in a statement on Sept. 16 that Routh had “no relation to” and “has never served” in the unit. “Rumors disseminated in certain media are not true.”

Read More: Private Messages Reveal What the Accused Trump Gunman Did in Ukraine

Authorities were warned about him

According to a report on Sept. 16 in the Wall Street Journal, authorities had been flagged about Routh’s erratic behavior in the past.

Chelsea Walsh, a nurse from West Palm Beach who met Routh several times in Kyiv in 2022, said that among foreign volunteers he originally came off as an eccentric but that his threats of violence against world leaders like Putin and general “antisocial traits” worried her so much that when she returned to the U.S. in June of that year, she spoke to a Customs and Border Protection officer for an hour at Washington’s Dulles airport to convey her concerns. She identified Routh as the most dangerous American she’d encountered during her month-and-a-half in Ukraine, according to the Journal. Walsh said she filed an online report with the FBI and Interpol after she heard in 2023 that Routh was attempting to recruit Syrian refugees to fight in Ukraine, but she never heard back from either agency.

The Journal also reported that Sarah Adams, a former CIA officer who helped coordinate aid groups in Ukraine, warned aid groups to “Beware of American Ryan Routh,” who she said had developed a reputation as a “fraudster” and “kind of a whack job.” Aid groups banned Routh from their Signal (private messaging) groups, according to Adams, and notified the U.S. State Department amid concerns that he might be engaging in human trafficking or immigration fraud.

‘Doesn’t sound like the man I know’

Relatives and acquaintances of Routh have spoken out to say that they were surprised by the news of his alleged involvement in the shooting at Trump’s golf course on Sept. 15.

In a text message to CNN, Routh’s son Oran described his father as “loving and caring” and an “honest hardworking man.” The younger Routh added: “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.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Oran Routh described his father’s passion for Ukraine: “My dad went over there and saw people f---ing fighting and dying.” Ryan Routh, Oran said, “tried to make sure shit was cool, and shit was not cool.” Meanwhile, he added of Trump, “this guy’s sitting behind his f---ing desk, not doing a goddamn thing.” Asked what he would say to his father now, the younger Routh responded: “I know the discourse isn’t working, but we still need to stick to the discourse.”

A woman who lived next door to Routh in Greensboro, N.C., and said she’s known him for nearly two decades told Fox8 WGHP that he was an unusual character but that she did not expect him to be involved in an attempted assassination of Trump.

The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Routh owned many guns and that “a lot of people were afraid of him back in the day,” but she added: “Him, I mean, trying to shoot Trump. That’s a lot. I would have never guessed, and I would have swore up and down, no, that’s not him. … I just can’t believe it. I mean, if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I mean the pictures and stuff and all, then I wouldn’t be able to believe that.”

Routh’s neighbor in Hawaii, David Stant, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser  upon hearing about the incident that it was “crazy, super crazy” and that Routh was “real mellow, low-key … quiet.”

Decades ago, Routh had been profiled for his good deeds: the Greensboro News & Record in 1991 published a story that called then-25-year-old Ryan Routh “a super citizen if not a super hero,” who had been awarded a Law Enforcement Oscar by the Greensboro chapter of the International Union of Police Association for helping to confront a rapist and assist in his arrest.

“I hope that everybody else would have done the same thing in the same situation,” Routh said at the time. “When these types of incidents happen, most of what you do is just impulse. You’re just reacting. I was happy to be at the right place at the right time.”