A journey from N.C. to Ukraine to suspect in apparent assassination attempt

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Months before he allegedly pointed a semiautomatic rifle into a Florida golf course as former president Donald Trump approached, Ryan Routh described himself as a failure. In his book, Routh repeatedly wondered why someone hadn’t killed Russian leader Vladimir Putin. “No one here in the US appears to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection,” he wrote. He could be odd, many of them said, and had a history of mostly minor run-ins with police, but wasn’t threatening. “He was a little intense, but super nice,” said Tony Strader, Routh’s neighbor in the seaside community of Kaaawa, Hawaii. While Routh saw himself engaged in a Manichaean battle of good vs. evil, others found his activities there counterproductive and disturbing — so much so that they flagged him to U.S. government agencies, they said. Body-camera video shows Ryan Wesley Routh, the man suspected of possibly trying to assassinate former president Donald Trump, being arrested. Saili Levi, a vanilla grower on Oahu, described a disconcerting experience last year after he paid Routh to build a trailer. Routh wrote that he had traveled to Ukraine twice in support of “freedom, human rights and democracy around the world and I come back to bullshit such as this.” Advertisement “Perhaps I would be happier dead on the front lines than dealing with rich people in fancy cars as I drive old broken-down vehicles and hoping to keep my account out of the negative and hoping for food to eat,” wrote Routh in the email, which Levi shared. “You disappoint me as a human.” Routh, 58, appeared in court Monday for a hearing on two federal firearms charges. Federal law enforcement officials have not yet identified a motive for his alleged actions, and Routh’s lawyer declined to comment Tuesday. To trace Routh’s path, The Washington Post interviewed nearly 20 people in the United States and Europe who knew him or had knowledge of moments in his life. Much of his journey remains unclear, including when he arrived in Florida, where he allegedly hid just outside Trump’s golf course for hours overnight. Advertisement The portrait that emerges from Routh’s associates is of a man who spent much of his life in anonymity, only to seek purpose and attention in recent years in Ukraine, before seizing the most powerful spotlight possible in what authorities say was an apparent attempt to assassinate a presidential candidate. His older son, Oran, told CNN that Routh was “a loving and caring father. … It doesn’t sound like the man I know to do anything crazy, much less violent.” ‘A whole, live horse’ Routh was raised in a well-to-do subdivision of Greensboro, said Kimberly Hassler, a longtime family friend. Hassler remembered Routh as a friendly and energetic person who was generally more fun than his two siblings, who she said went on to become a lawyer and a banker. “They were one of the closest families we knew,” she said. Hassler last saw Routh in 2021, when he returned to North Carolina from Hawaii to deliver a eulogy at his father’s funeral. In his book, Routh wrote that he was “kicked out and on my own” at the age of 16. He spent two semesters at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in the mid-1990s but didn’t earn a degree, a university spokeswoman said. An early brush with the authorities had Routh cast as a hero: In 1991, at the age of 25, he was featured in the Greensboro News and Record after he confronted and chased a rape suspect. Advertisement In April of that year, Routh was arrested for possessing an explosive device, according to Chris Parrish, the assistant district attorney of Guilford County. Then, that December, Routh was stopped by Tracy Fulk, at the time a Greensboro police sergeant, for driving his pickup with a revoked driver’s license. Routh immediately drove off, she said, and barricaded himself inside his business, United Roofing. After several hours, Routh emerged and was arrested. After that, Routh continued to pop up in North Carolina case records — driving without insurance, failure to pay taxes — but was not arrested again until eight years later, in 2010. He pleaded guilty to theft after stealing two sinks and construction material, Parrish said, and was sentenced to probation. “A whole, live horse,” she said. “It was crazy.” Share this article Share Despite such eccentricities, the neighbors generally got along. But they didn’t bother me, and I didn’t bother them,” Mungo said. Routh sold the ramshackle house earlier this year for $170,000, a deal he negotiated from Hawaii. ‘Something wasn’t 100 percent’ Around 2018, Routh moved to Hawaii, where he lived with a woman who described herself as his fiancée on a GoFundMe page. For two years, he volunteered his services with HomeAid Hawai’i, a nonprofit that combats homelessness. Kimo Carvalho, the group’s executive director, said in a statement that the group received no complaints about Routh. However, at one point in 2019, the FBI received a tip alleging that Routh possessed a firearm, something prohibited because of his criminal record. Jeffrey B. Veltri, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami field office, said Monday that investigators interviewed the person who submitted the tip and passed the information to local law enforcement in Honolulu. Four years after Routh arrived in Oahu, however, the focus of his attention changed dramatically. After Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Routh joined a flow of volunteers who wanted to support Ukraine’s war effort. While many had prior military experience, Routh had none. The international legion of Ukraine’s armed forces turned him down because of his age and inexperience, according to an interview Routh gave in 2022. Instead, Routh set up a tent in Kyiv’s central Independence Square and spent several weeks camped there before the structure was removed by police. Guillaume Ptak, a French freelance journalist, said that Routh approached him in June 2022 and asked to be filmed in Independence Square. In the video, Routh speaks in front of a display he created of 50 flags he said represented the nationalities of people who had volunteered to fight with Ukraine. Routh appeared “gaunt, emaciated and seemed not to have been sleeping a lot,” Ptak said in an interview this week. His conversation was “all over the place.” Ptak found him “loopy but well-meaning.” Advertisement A military medic from the United Kingdom, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, echoed that assessment. “After a few minutes talking to him, you could tell that something wasn’t 100 percent,” the medic said. Chelsea Walsh, a nurse from Florida, spent six weeks volunteering in Ukraine and said she met Routh there in May 2022. Some of them were sincere while others were like Routh, she said, describing him as an opportunist. “He was very erratic,” Walsh said. When Walsh returned to the United States, she said, she spent an hour at the airport with Customs and Border Protection personnel detailing her concerns about several Americans in Ukraine she felt were dangerous. All told, Routh spent five months in Ukraine in 2022 and three months there last year, according to his account. In Kyiv, he was filmed wearing a T-shirt with his email address and phone number, presenting himself as a military recruiter promising pay of “$1200.” In his book, Routh describes repeated and futile efforts to obtain visas for Afghan volunteers to travel to Ukraine. “Paperwork overrides the slaughter of humans every time,” he wrote bitterly. For several Americans connected to aid efforts in Ukraine, Routh’s activities looked like possible human trafficking. There were also widespread concerns about Routh’s mental health, said Sarah Adams, a former CIA officer who helped run a network that linked 50 aid groups to share information and coordinate humanitarian efforts. In June of last year, Adams put a warning about Routh on her network’s LinkedIn page telling people to beware of him and his recruitment scheme. Routh was instructing Afghans to travel illegally to Iran, she said, as a pathway toward joining the Ukrainian foreign legion. “This is a fraud,” she wrote. The same day, Adams said, a colleague forwarded the alert about Routh to the State Department. Evelyn Aschenbrenner, an American who served in the administration of the Ukrainian International Legion until June, told Routh by text message late last year to stop his “absurd” efforts to recruit Afghan soldiers to fight in Ukraine. “You are absolutely not helping anything by doing this,” Aschenbrenner wrote. Do less.” For Aschenbrenner, the news that Routh was arrested in connection with a possible assassination attempt did not come as a surprise. “There’s a streak of zealotry in him,” she said. “I knew he was not firing with all pistons.” Back in Hawaii, however, Routh’s appearance in the news — and the sight of at least a dozen agents combing through his home early Tuesday — was met with shock. Strader, Routh’s neighbor, said Routh was “kind of in his head” but he never imagined him to be capable of violence. Routh never spoke with Strader about Ukraine or Trump, he said. Earlier this year, Routh and his partner posted Biden-Harris campaign signs along the busy highway in front of their house, said Strader, 36, a solar engineer. A beat-up truck parked outside the home bore stickers for Biden-Harris and Camp Box Honolulu, Routh’s company. Bill Braden, a painter in Hawaii, has known Routh for about five years, ever since Routh sold him a trailer that Braden uses for guests. Routh and his partner are “hardworking, down-to-earth people,” Braden said. “I thought he was a good guy.” Levi, the vanilla farmer, had a similar view — at least initially. Routh was older but “pretty cool,” Levi said, and enthusiastic about his work. After contacting Routh and receiving his angry reply, Levi decided the dispute was no longer worth his time. “He wasn’t a threat, he just ripped me off,” said Levi, 40. In recent months, Routh posted criticism of Trump on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Trump’s campaign slogan should be “MASA” or “Make Americans Slaves Again,” Routh wrote. In his book, published in 2023, Routh described himself as neither a Democrat nor a Republican. “I must take part of the blame for the retarded child we elected,” he wrote. Toward the end of his account, Routh grew both morbid and grandiose. “One way or another I doubt I will make it out of this year alive,” he wrote, saying that he might be killed by the Taliban or by Russia. On Sunday, police apprehended Routh fleeing north on Interstate 95 in Florida. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/18/ryan-routh-trump-suspect/