The accused gunman suspected in an attempted assassination plot against former president Donald Trump claimed he had fought on the front lines of Ukraine, built tiny houses for homeless people in Hawaii and had a long rap sheet, including an arrest for possession of a weapon of mass destruction, according to public records.

Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, a former roofing contractor, is a convicted felon who had been stopped by police in North Carolina at least 100 times — including an incident in which the bomb squad was called to investigate whether he was building pipe bombs, according to Tracy Fulk, a former Greensboro police officer who arrested him in an armed standoff in 2002.

As recently as 2023, Routh self-published a book in which he called for Iran to kill the former president, describing Trump as a “child that we elected for our next president that ended up being brainless.”

Federal agents were still trying to piece together how Routh managed to get so close to the former president. Routh was arrested Sunday after he fled Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, where investigators say he had set up a high-powered rifle and a scope behind bushes in an apparent attempt to shoot Trump as he golfed about 400 yards away. The Secret Service saw the weapon, however, and fired shots at the gunman, who took off in a black Nissan. A witness snapped a photo of the vehicle’s license plate which led to his capture.

Routh was charged Monday with possession of a firearm and ammunition by a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.

Routh was well known to police in Greensboro, N.C., where he spent most of his life before moving to Hawaii.

“We would get dangerous-person reports — criminal intelligence reports — about him and our bomb team had also dealt with him,” Fulk told The Miami Herald.

“It doesn’t surprise me that he did something like this — he had a past of having explosives, running from police and he didn’t like government-type people.”

Routh held passionate political views that were all over the map. He said he regretted voting for Trump and was so disturbed by Russian’s invasion of Ukraine that he mounted a motley effort to assemble recruits to help fight on the front lines, according to his social media accounts.

He reached out to the New York Times to discuss his theories on the war and to discuss his heroic endeavors to fight and die in Ukraine, the paper reported. He also tried to meet with the Helsinki Commission to persuade them to do more for Ukraine, the Times reported.

He moved to Hawaii in 2018, where he lived in a bungalow in Kaaawa, on a bluff overlooking the ocean on the east side of the island of Oahu. A woman identified as his wife, Kathleen Shaffer, set up a GoFundMe account in 2022 to raise funds to support Routh, claiming that he had “put his life at home on hold” and traveled to Kyiv to fight. Shaffer said her job as a manager for Victoria’s Secret in Honolulu had recently been eliminated, and she was worried about their future.

“My husband ... decided to volunteer in Ukraine. My world was turned upside down. It has now been 5 months and he is still there fighting to win the war against Russia. I am supporting him and trying to figure out what is next for me,” she said in a post on her Linked-In page.

There is no evidence that Routh ever fought in Ukraine. The Herald was unsuccessful in reaching Shaffer on Monday.

In his book, Routh claimed that he made his way to Poland but was turned away at the border because he was 56 and had no military experience. He then said he tried to recruit volunteers for the Ukrainian army, and he corresponded on Signal with members of Ukraine’s International Legion, which soon concluded that he was “delusional.”

A former volunteer for the Legion, who corresponded with Routh, told Newsweek that she wasn’t even sure he was ever in Ukraine.

“He had “delusions of grandeur,” she said.

Video shot by the AP showed Routh in Kyiv’s Independence Square in April 2022, two months after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of the country, holding a poster that said: “We cannot tolerate corruption and evil for another 50+ years. End Russia for our kids.”

Routh’s writings

Routh’s social media accounts, now suspended by Facebook and X, show a man whose political viewpoints shifted over the years, ranging from support of politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Trump — to his support more recently of former Republican presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley.

Routh described his support of Trump as a “terrible mistake” in his 2023 self-published book — “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War.” In it, he described the former president as an “idiot,” and appealed to Iran to assassinate Trump for abandoning the Iranian nuclear deal.

“You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal,” Routh wrote. “No one here in the U.S. seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection.”

The book — which included graphic photos of the war, including the decapitation of children — mostly delved into his efforts to recruit fighters to help Ukraine. Anti-Russia sentiments were also scattered throughout his book, in which he criticized world leaders for not standing up to Russia President Vladimir Putin.

Routh said of his politics: “I get so tired of people asking me if I am a Democrat or Republican as I refuse to be put in a category.”

“The world would be better it were run by women,” he wrote, because “it seems that the totality of the world’s problems revolve around men with massive insecurity and childlike intelligence and behavior.”

Frank Figliuzzi, the former deputy director of counter intelligence for the FBI, said the suspect’s political leanings may not have anything to do with his motive for trying to shoot Trump.

“The reality is he is all over the place politically. I think social media has led people like this who just want to put themselves on the map. We’ve reached an inflection point in society where infamy is the prime motivator versus passion or purpose about a political issue,” he said.

In recent years, Routh was running a company called Camp Box Honolulu. On his company website, he offered to build mobile storage units and small houses for clients and for those in need of housing. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser quoted him in 2019 pledging to help erect tiny homes for homeless people in Hawaii.

“This business is not about making money but rather providing economical simple shelters for our housing crisis for those that need it, but by the same token we do not deal with selfish, greedy, OCD people just looking to get one over, just nice people that need a simple building,” he said on his website.

On his Linked-In page, Routh said he had a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina A&T University.

His son, Oran, 35, told CNN that Ryan Routh was a loving father who was hardworking.

“I don’t know what happened in Florida, but I hope things have been exaggerated because, from what little I’ve heard, it doesn’t sound like the man I know,” said Routh’s son. “He’s not someone who would do anything reckless, let alone violent. He’s a good father and a great man, and I hope you portray him truthfully.”

Ryan W. Routh, seen in a photo snapped Sept. 15, 2024 by the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, which detained the alleged gunman on I-95 after a witness gave law enforcement a description of a man seen fleeing Donald Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course in a Nissan. Martin County Sheriff's Office

Past arrests

Public records, however, show dozens of arrests in North Carolina over the past two decades, on charges ranging from driving without a license and writing bad checks to weapons possession. He was also a plaintiff or a defendant in more than 200 civil lawsuits, most of them involving his roofing company.

In 2002, Routh barricaded himself inside his business, after he fled a traffic stop in Greensboro. Fulk, who pulled him over that day, recalls that she saw Routh driving and knew that he did not have a valid license. Upon approaching his pickup truck, she saw him motion toward a duffel bag in his center console with a gun inside. She ordered him to step out of his pickup truck, and he instead fled and locked himself inside his roofing company.

“I could see him pacing back and forth inside the building, but I don’t recall him saying anything,” she said. He refused orders to come out, so officers were forced to break in and arrest him. They found him with a machine gun, she said.

Fulk, who retired in 2017, said she didn’t have to go to court because Routh pleaded guilty. According to the Raleigh News & Observer, Routh was convicted of felony possession of a weapon of mass destruction and several misdemeanors including carrying a concealed weapon; hit and run; resisting an officer; and driving while license revoked.

The criminal complaint noted that the gun found at the scene on Sunday was an SKS-style rifle with a scope and an obliterated serial number. The SKS, which is similar to an AK-47, isn’t manufactured in Florida, which means Routh would have had to bring it across state lines — or he may have purchased it through a unlicensed gun dealer. The SKS is a weapon commonly purchased at gun shows.

Lindsay Nichols, the policy director at Giffords Law Center, a gun safety group, pointed out that Florida and other states do not require unlicensed firearm dealers to conduct criminal background checks — or what gun safety advocates have long referred to as the “gun show loophole.” That means that in Florida, a person with a felony conviction could potentially acquire a gun from an unlicensed seller.

The Biden administration has tried to expand requirements that gun sellers obtain a license and perform background checks. In Florida, state officials have fought the effort, arguing the new rules have led to a decline in gun show attendance and as a result, a loss in revenue taxes in the state.

Between 2017 and 2021, federal officials found that unlicensed dealers were the sources of 68,000 illegally trafficked firearms, according to the White House.

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(Miami Herald staff writer Jay H. Weaver contributed to this report.)

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