Former employee of Trump shooting suspect recalls police standoff and penchant for ‘stupid’ behavior
A North Carolina woman who once worked for the suspect cops say attempted to assassinate Donald Trump while the former president golfed on Sunday remembered her former boss as someone widely derided over his penchant for doing “stupid s***.”
Tina Cooper, 58, a former employee at United Roofing, a Greensboro, North Carolina contracting company owned by suspect Ryan Wesley Routh, told The Independent that she hadn’t thought much about Routh since he abruptly fired her two decades ago.
Now, Routh has been detained after allegedly putting the barrel of a AK47-style rifle through the perimeter fence of the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach in what the FBI says “appears to be an attempted assassination of former President Trump.”
That’s a far cry from when Cooper was hired to assist Routh, a father of three, with paperwork around his roofing company office. Routh, 58, who had gotten his driver’s license revoked in 2002, gave Cooper one of his cars to use in order to pick him up in the mornings and shuttle him around town, she said.
In December 2002, Routh’s criminal actions caught the attention of local papers.
“He had a standoff here, and I don’t know what he was thinking then, either,” Cooper said on Sunday night.
Although he no longer had a valid license, Routh was behind the wheel when he was pulled over by Greensboro police, according to news reports from the time. He fled the scene and drove to the United Roofing offices, where he barricaded himself inside, armed with a fully-automatic machine gun, the Greensboro News & Record reported.
Three hours later, Routh surrendered. He was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and possession of a weapon of mass destruction, for the machine gun, as well as resisting, delaying and obstructing a law enforcement officer and driving while his license was revoked.
“All I know is that I got woken up one morning with the news that he had got arrested and the guys needed work orders, so I went and got the work orders,” Cooper said. “He had threatened to blow up the entire Greensboro Police Department, that was all documented in the police reports.”
A judge handed down a suspended sentence and probation to Routh, who avoided prison altogether, court records show.
In an interview with Wired, Tracy Fulk, the officer who arrested Routh that day said, “I figured he was either dead or in prison by now. I had no clue that he had moved on and was continuing his escapades.”
Fulk said Routh had been involved in other standoffs, and that officers “always knew he had weapons.” Routh’s rap sheet dates back to the early 1980s, with dozens of charges for vehicular offenses including DUIs.
“All we can do is arrest them and then obviously it goes into the court system and they decide all of that,” Fulk told Wired. “It’s frustrating at times.”
For Cooper, her role at United Roofing quickly turned into a much bigger one than first expected, as she functioned as a personal assistant to Routh.
