Ryan Routh has been on both sides of the law, once helping the police catch a rapist.
Ryan Routh was outside his North Carolina home in the spring of 1991 when he heard a woman screaming for help from on top of a nearby office building.
Routh was 25 at the time with a wife and young son at his home in Greensboro. He ran to the building to see what was going on, according to the Greensboro News & Record.
The woman had been raped by a man who had broken into the building, according to the paper. After the man crawled out the front door, Routh confronted him on the steps.
“He punched me at that point. He was a pretty strong fella,” Routh told a reporter.
The man fled. Routh chased him. Routh later rode with a police officer looking for the man, who he later identified in a photo lineup, leading to his arrest.
For his efforts, Routh was named the local police union’s “citizen of the year.” The paper praised him as a “super citizen if not a super hero.”
“When something happens [so close] it sort of shakes your world, too,” Routh told the News & Record. “When you have a wife and a 2-year-old child you act to put this guy away before something happens to your wife or your child.”
News reports suggest that Routh never lost that desire to be a hero and has been looking for a “monumental” cause for his life.
In the early 2000s, he came to the aid of a group of local teenagers who were fighting local government officials who’d closed the skateboard park they’d built. Then, a couple of years back, he traveled to Ukraine to fight the Russian invaders “to the death,” writing on X that we “must get every civilian in the world to come and join the fight; I will be the example.”
But court records and interviews with people who knew him suggest that even as he was being praised as a local hero, Routh’s life and mental health were spiraling.
On Sunday afternoon, more than 33 years after he confronted a man accused of rape, Routh, now 58, was back in the news. This time, instead of being the hero, he is accused of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump with a semi-automatic SKS rifle while the former president golfed at his West Palm Beach, Florida golf club.
“I’m not surprised,” former Routh business partner Samuel Plata told National Review when reached on his cell phone on Monday. “He’s crazy, man.”
Routh made several appearances in the News & Record over the years, especially when he was a newlywed and a young father. In 1990, the paper profiled him and his then-wife, Lora, after they renovated a dilapidated, 68-year-old bungalow they’d purchased. In 1991 the paper published a photo of him reading outside on an unseasonably warm winter day.
But Guilford County court records indicate that the legal troubles that would increasingly plague Routh had begun several years earlier. In 1983, when he would have been a teenager, he was cited for speeding, driving without a license, a red-light violation, and failure to report an accident. He repeatedly faced a variety of traffic offenses in subsequent years – speeding, driving without a license, driving without insurance.
Plata said he met Routh in the early 1990s through his uncle, who had worked with Routh in the roofing business. Routh’s first business went under, Plata said, but he and Routh started another one, United Roofing.
Plata said the business did well. They had over 100 employees at one point, and Routh branched out beyond roofing into other aspects of construction.
Plata described Routh as a “nice guy,” but said that he started to struggle
“In this business, if you don’t know how to handle it, you get a lot of stress,” he said.
Court records show that Routh continued to pile up traffic offenses throughout the 1990s: driving without a license, driving with an expired or revoked tag. Plata said that Routh’s legal troubles started getting expensive. He said Routh’s family members tried to get him help for his mental health, but it didn’t work and instead led to family divisions.
In the early 2000s, Routh’s legal troubles seemed to have worsened. He started facing charges of passing worthless checks, possession of stolen good and motor vehicles. Most prominently, in 2002 Routh was arrested after he fled a traffic stop and barricaded himself inside his roofing business with a machine gun, according to a News & Record report.
Routh’s landlord at the time told National Review on Monday that Routh was a “fine” tenant and a seemingly “friendly man” who paid his rent on time and didn’t cause trouble.
“I was surprised to hear about his run-in with the law,” the man, who asked that his name not be released, said of Routh barricading himself in his work building with a gun.
The landlord, said that after Routh moved out of the home he was renting, the police came to investigate. “He stored some machinery in a building we had on the farm there, and it seems like it was stolen,” he said.
Plata said he parted ways with his business partner in 2003. “He have a lot of issues with the workers. He had not … paid the guys. And one time he tried to shoot one of the Mexican guys he owed money,” he said of Routh. “I didn’t like that.”
In 2004, a News & Record report says that Routh started helping a group of teens, including his son, Oran Routh, build a skateboard park on a piece of land loaned by a local oil company. Routh paid a man to supervise the park, according to the report. But the park ran afoul of county zoning rules — it lacked a paved parking lot and handicapped-accessible bathrooms — and received noise complaints. They didn’t have the money to fix it.
“We are at a standstill,” Routh said of the skatepark at the time. “They say we have to have all this stuff. We say we can’t afford it.”
The skatepark was back in the news a couple of years later, according to a report that said Routh was then part of the Greensboro Skateboard Park Coalition.
One of the skateboarding teens, Atwill Milsun, told National Review in a text message that he knew Routh as a “good guy” who was “very blue collar.” Milsun was friends with Oran Routh, and they worked with Ryan Routh doing roofing during the summers in high school. “After my parents kicked me out he let me stay at their house,” Milsun said.
Milsun said Ryan Routh was divorced by that time. “I just remember him being a hard worker and very devoted to his kids,” Milsun said in a text. “When I knew him he was very involved with the community he worked with Habitat for Humanity and donated resources to the local robotics club.”
At some point, Routh ended up living in a home down a long rural road in the unincorporated community of Julian in Guilford County. Elliott Smith grew up in the area, and while he knew of Routh, he didn’t know much about him. While the neighbors in the area generally knew one another, “nobody really knew that guy too well,” Smith said.
A woman who lived next door to Routh for nearly two decades told the local Fox 8 station that Routh was unusual, but she didn’t expect he’d ever be accused of trying to kill a president. However, she said she knew that Routh had access to guns.
“I’ve seen the guns myself and all,” she said, adding that “a lot of people were afraid of him back in the day.”
The neighbor told Fox 8 that Routh moved to Hawaii in May, though other reports suggest he’d lived in Hawaii longer than that. His most recent traffic offenses in Guilford County are from March 2019 — he was cited for driving without a license, failure to wear a seat belt, and driving with an expired tag. His LinkedIn account says he’s owned a Hawaii building business called Camp Box Honolulu in since 2018.
“Having passed along any meager remnants of myself in North Carolina and relocated to Oahu, I currently build very simple housing structures for the less fortunate and pursue a wide range of other creative projects towards developing unique products and devices as well as community improvement project,” his LinkedIn says, adding that he “would tremendously enjoy the invitation to join any monumental worthy cause to bring about real change in our world” and is “free to relocate to any remote location on the planet that might render the most positive impact.”
Routh appears to have found a “monumental worthy cause” when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Routh became deeply invested in aiding Ukraine and recruiting foreign fighters to take on the Russians. In a February 2022 tweet, he wrote, “I am ready to go to Ukraine and fight and die for the kids and families of Ukraine, we all cannot sit around and do nothing. We need to flood Ukraine with citizens from around the globe for a massive civilian army. Someone respond to me and let’s do it.”
He spoke to several prominent news outlets, including the New York Times and Semafor about his efforts. But while he appears to have traveled to Ukraine, he never fought there because he was too old and didn’t have any military experience, according to the Times.
While he repeatedly said he was ready to fight and die for Ukraine, he also wrote in May 2022 that “killing anywhere is extremely tragic.”
It’s unclear what may have driven Routh to Trump’s golf club on Sunday.
While he has donated to Democrats in recent years, Routh’s social media suggests he voted for Trump in 2016. He has since turned on the former president.
The Associated Press reported that he wrote a self-published book in 2023 that called the former president a “fool” and a “buffoon” and said Iran was “free to assassinate Trump.”
In 2020, Routh appears to have backed the presidential campaign of Hawaii’s then-congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, according to his posts on X. Earlier this year he expressed support for Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy to defeat Trump in the Republican primary.
Routh appeared in court on Monday and was charged with two federal gun crimes — possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an erased serial number. Shortly after the charges were announced, phone records revealed that Routh spent nearly 12 hours near the golf course before he was spotted with a gun by an agent who fired at him. No motive for the thwarted attack has been revealed.
“The subject who did not have line of sight to the former president fled the scene.
He did not fire or get off any shots at our agent,” acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe Jr. told reporters on Monday.
Attempts by National Review to reach Routh’s family members were unsuccessful. His son, Oran Routh, told the Daily Mail on Sunday that his father hated Trump as “every reasonable person does.” But he insisted that his dad, whom he’d had a falling out with, is not dangerous. “He’s my dad and all he’s had is couple traffic tickets, as far as I know,” Oran Routh said. “That’s crazy. I know my dad and love my dad, but that’s nothing like him.”