Ryan Wesley Routh ‘would have had to wait’ for Trump to head down the 6th hole toward his makeshift sniper’s next, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told Fox News
The man suspected of trying to assassinate Donald Trump did not seem to have a clear shot at the 45th president before he was confronted by a Secret Service agent doing an advance patrol, the sheriff of Florida’s Palm Beach County said Monday morning.
Investigators say Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was lying in wait off the sixth hole at the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach Sunday afternoon, while the 78-year-old played the fifth hole on the eastern edge of the property.
“From where [the gunman] was at, he would have had to wait for the president to get up to that hole and then turn and face going toward the area he was at,” Ric Bradshaw told “Fox & Friends.”
“It doesn’t appear to me, knowing what I know about the terrain there and where we are looking at, that he had a clear shot from there to where the president was before he would make the turn to come that way [down the sixth hole].”
The agent, walking at least one hole ahead of the former president, had spotted what “appeared to be a rifle poking out of the tree line” and opened fire, causing Routh to flee, per a federal criminal complaint unsealed Monday.
