(AFP) – US Secret Service agents and a sheriff’s deputy fatally shot and killed a man armed with a shotgun who breached the security perimeter of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in the early hours of Sunday morning. Trump was in Washington at the time of the incident, which officials said happened around 1:30 am (0630 GMT).
The suspect, a man in his early 20s, was spotted by the north gate of the Mar-a-Lago property, carrying a shotgun and a fuel can, the Secret Service said. Agents confronted the man and told him to disarm, but the man raised his gun. “The only words that we said to him was ‘drop the items’ which means the gas can and the shotgun,” Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told reporters.
“At which time he put down the gas can, raised the shotgun to a shooting position,” Bradshaw said. A deputy and two Secret Service agents then shot him. The individual was pronounced deceased and no US officers were injured. The Secret Service said no one under its protection was present in Mar-a-Lago at the time. There was no immediate reaction from the White House.
Trump, who often spends his weekends in Mar-a-Lago, has been the target of several assassination plots or attempts. Earlier this month, Ryan Routh, 59, who plotted to assassinate the president at a Florida golf course in September 2024, two months before the US election, was sentenced to life in prison. Routh’s planned attack on Trump came two months after an assassination attempt on the Republican leader in Pennsylvania, where 20-year-old Matthew Crooks fired several shots during a rally, one of them grazing Trump’s right ear.
That attack, in which a rallygoer was killed, proved to be a turning point in Trump’s return to power. Crooks was immediately shot and killed by security forces and his motive remains unknown. The incident early Sunday was the latest in a series of episodes of political violence in a highly polarized country. Conservative influencer and Trump ally Charlie Kirk was shot dead on a Utah college campus in September 2025, prompting a wave of grief among conservatives and threats from Trump to crack down on “the radical left.”
The name of the suspect in the Sunday incident has not been released while officials attempt to contact his relatives. The US Secret Service is responsible for the safety of the president, vice president and former presidents, and their families, as well as major election candidates and visiting foreign heads of state. – Maria DANILOVA
© 2024 AFP
