As Trump finished the fifth hole, just 300 yards away an AK-47 was poking through the bushes waiting for him
Donald Trump was enjoying an afternoon of golf at his resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday when shots rang out just ahead of him.
As Trump made his way between holes five and six of the course, just before 2pm local time, a Secret Service agent who had been dispatched to check the next hole as part of the agency’s protective “bubble”, had spotted a gunman’s rifle poking out of the shrubbery.
The agent dispatched a volley of shots into the bushes, as Trump was rushed to safety. He was as few as 300 yards from the incident.
It came just two months after another lone gunman, Thomas Crooks, took shots at the former president from a nearby rooftop at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania.
But unlike on that day, Trump’s Secret Service protection was unable to neutralise the threat immediately.
The suspect fled the scene, and a witness spotted a man leaving the area and climbing into a Nissan SUV parked nearby.
The witness snapped a photograph of the car and phoned the police.
The former president’s campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, issued a statement informing the press that Trump was “safe following gunshots in his vicinity”.
As reports first emerged of shots fired at the golf course, the early indications were that two gunmen had been shooting at each other in an incident unrelated to Trump.
But law enforcement officials knew that four to five rounds of ammunition had been fired by an agent protecting Trump. It became clear to those working at the scene that another gunman had tried to kill the former president.
For the next 30 minutes, a frantic manhunt was launched involving two local police forces, the Secret Service and the FBI.
Palm Beach County’s sheriff’s office fired up its “real time crime centre”, feeding the details from the driver’s number plate into its system.
In Martin’s County, north of the scene, Sheriff William D. Snyder had settled in for a coffee break when a BOLO alert ─ code for “be on look out” ─ flashed up from the neighbouring force.
“I had just sat down to have my only second cup of coffee today, and as soon as I heard the BOLO being looked out, heading to Martin [county], I knew we’d get the car,” he later recalled.
“I sat my coffee down and started getting ready to come out here.”
Police raced along the i-95, an interstate running the entire length of the US east coast, past Trump’s golf course in Florida and towards North Carolina.
Fifty miles away from the bushes where the shots were fired, the Nissan was brought to a stop by police.
Sheriff Snyder and his officers recovered a lone driver from the car, described as displaying a “relatively calm, flat” demeanour.
“He was not displaying a lot of emotions,” he said. “Never asked, ‘What is this about?’
“Obviously [there were] law enforcement with long rifles, blue lights, a lot going on. He never questioned it.”
The man’s identity had not been confirmed by police on Sunday night, but sources told US media outlets he was 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh.
He was taken into custody, while the witness who had first spotted the car was flown to the scene of the arrest by helicopter.
They confirmed the vehicle was the same one spotted fleeing the scene earlier in the afternoon.
It later emerged that Routh, a construction worker from North Carolina, had travelled to Ukraine several times in the early days of the war in an attempt to recruit soldiers to the International Legion.
But he has since been described by those who worked in the Legion as “full of s--t and hot air”. The Legion also denied Routh was ever involved in the group.
The road remained closed on Sunday afternoon and the scene was complicated further by an unrelated crash between two vehicles that were brought to a stop by the police roadblock.
Back at the Trump International Golf Club, officers searched the bushes where the gunman was identified and recovered two backpacks and an AK-47-style rifle.
The bags contained ceramic tiles and a GoPro video camera had been fixed to the fence.
The tiles were in the second backpack, and experts said the gunman would have slipped this on backwards so that the tiles protected his chest, acting in the same way as a bullet-proof vest.
Authorities believe the camera had been brought and set up to film the incident. Both were seized by the FBI, which assumed responsibility for the investigation into what was by then an assumed assassination attempt against Trump.
Jeffrey B. Veltri, the lead agent in the FBI’s Miami field office, deployed the full force of the agency’s resources, including investigative and crisis response teams, bomb technicians and personnel to recover and analyse evidence.
The FBI was handed the suspect’s vehicle (circled below) for a full search, although police said he was not armed as he was taken into custody.
The local attorney’s office put together the paperwork to charge the suspect, if investigations confirm he was the shooter.
Further federal charges could be brought at a later date.
The incident immediately raised concerns about the level of security offered to Trump, even after an attempt on his life that almost succeeded in July.
After the first shooting, in which a bullet grazed Trump’s ear, the Secret Service faced severe criticism for its failure to prevent an assassin getting close enough to their “principal” to take a shot.
Ric Bradshaw, the Palm Beach County Sheriff, preempted concerns about the former president’s security team in a press conference on Sunday afternoon.
Describing the response as “fabulous”, he said that Floridians should “be proud of your law enforcement”.
“We started out with ‘we don’t know anything,’ to where we had a tag, we had a vehicle description, and we got an area where we saw the person,” he said.
But describing the scene on the golf course earlier in the afternoon, he acknowledged that the second assassination attempt had been almost as close as the first.
“When this gentleman was caught and stopped, [Trump was] probably between 300 and 500 yards [away],” he said.
“But with a rifle and a scope like that, that’s not a long distance.”
A second attempt on Trump’s life, on a golf course he owns and uses regularly, will raise serious concerns that the Secret Service has not learned from the first assassination attempt.
After that attack, the Department of Homeland Security launched an immediate review into Trump’s security detail, and banned him from speaking outdoors without a bulletproof screen around him.
Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service director, resigned and the government issued statements attempting to reassure the public that the former president was safe.
But on Sunday afternoon, Mr Bradshaw acknowledged: “The security is what the Secret Service deems possible”.
“You’ve got to understand that the golf course is surrounded by shrubbery, so [if] someone gets into the shrubbery, they’re pretty much out of sight,” he said.
“At the level that he is right now, he’s not a sitting president. If he was, we would have had this whole golf course surrounded.”
Trump’s statement after the shooting was typically bullish. He told his supporters in an email: “FEAR NOT! I am safe and well, and no one was hurt. Thank God!
“But, there are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us.
“I will not stop fighting for you.
“I will Never Surrender!”
But back at Secret Service headquarters, the mood is unlikely to be so upbeat.
“The threat level is high,” said an agency spokesman, in response to a journalist’s question that risked stating the obvious.
“We live in dangerous times.”