GREENSBORO, N.C. — The man accused of pointing a rifle into the golf course where former President Donald Trump was playing last weekend was known in his hometown as something of a bad actor.
“Weird” is how one of Ryan Routh’s former neighbors in Greensboro described him. She told reporters he once had a horse in his house and that he also kept guns.
A man, who like the first neighbor, asked not to be identified for fear of being associated with Routh, says he didn’t know the 58-year-old well but got a similar vibe.
“I mean, [he] seemed to be pretty strange,” he said. “You never know who's in the neighborhood,” his wife added.
But if Routh’s neighbors didn’t know him well, the police sure did.
“We were on a first-name basis,” said Eric Rasecke, a now-retired Greensboro police officer whose beat included the areas where Routh lived and worked.
“I’ve had well over 100 encounters with Ryan,” Rasecke said.
It started with traffic violations, like driving with an expired registration.
“You know it wasn’t expired by a month or two. It was by years,” Rasecke said. “And he had no insurance on his vehicles, and his license was always suspended.”
Rasecke remembers Routh as a cocky guy with a grandiose view of himself and a sense that he was "above the law."
“He would always be running his mouth,” Rasecke said, but always stopped short of any explicit threat. “He would give me a smirk and comment like, ‘Oh, I hope you’re well,' before adding something like, 'You know, life is short, and you never know.' ”
As time passed, Rasecke says he watched Routh rapidly unravel, from a guy who was once a solid citizen who owned and operated a successful roofing business in town and who once received a commendation from the police for stopping a woman from being raped.
“Through the years, his appearance went from clean cut and well-groomed to becoming very thin, his eyes basically withdrawn, his body movements shaky," Rasecke said, "and [he had] a paranoid attitude very indicative of drug usage.”
Routh was never convicted of any drug charges, but Resecke believes drug use was driving the downward spiral. And he said Routh would always blame everyone else for his troubles.
“It was always ‘the city is picking on me. The police department is picking on me,’” Resecke recalls. “Everyone was against him, trying to get him, trying to ruin his business, trying to ruin his life, trying to condemn his house.”
“Oh my God, memories!” Rasecke exclaims as he returns to where Routh’s home once stood. It has since been razed, and the lot is now empty.
Rasecke remembers Routh living there in a small, single-story, two-bedroom home, where he was also housing a half dozen or so workers from his roofing company.
“It was very dingy and dirty,” Rasecke recalls. “There was mattresses on the floor, there was trash on the floor. It stunk. It was nasty.”
Routh had built a metal addition on the back of the house, where more workers lived, Rasecke says, and across the street, he ran electricity and water to a large windowless trailer, where workers lived as well.
The trailer is still there today, inside a chain link fence, along with Routh’s red Jeep, a rusty bike, wrecked furniture, tools and heaps of metal and building materials.
To Rasecke, the scene is like a catalog of Routh’s crimes.
“He didn’t have this tarp on the front until after I caught him with the stolen vehicle in there," Rasecke said, pointing to the junk heap. He then spins around toward the other side of the street. “And there is where the hit-and-run vehicle was parked, directly in front of his house."
One of Routh’s most serious offenses took place just down the road, at a dilapidated building that used to be his business offices.
“This is where he drove to and where our stand-off was,” Rasecke said.
That incident started with a traffic stop in 2002. Rasecke recalls that when an officer spotted a machine gun in Routh's car, Routh became irate, sped away and barricaded himself inside his business with explosives. Routh was convicted of possession of a weapon of mass destruction, a felony.
Meantime, Routh was also getting himself into a heap of legal trouble in his business dealings.
“It’s never good when a sheriff says, 'We know this guy,' ” said trial lawyer Howie Labiner. “That’s usually a giveaway that something is not going well over there.”
Indeed, Labiner would come to find out for himself in 2008, after he won a $28,000 lawsuit against Routh for a client who was also in the roofing business. The sheriff went multiple times to Routh’s home and business to collect the debt, Labiner says, but was never successful. He says the sheriff described the building as a fortress. Labiner says Routh has still not paid up. And he says his client’s case was not unique.
“There are three-plus pages of court cases against Mr. Routh and his roofing companies,” Labiner said. “This was not his first rodeo, let’s put it that way.”
Routh’s more recent exploits are certainly more outlandish, but as Rasecke sees it, they reflect the same kind of duplicity and self-aggrandizing that he saw in Routh years ago.
For example, he points to Routh’s posturing as a military recruiter to help save Ukraine. Routh was promoting himself as something of a savior of the Ukranian people -- as well as democracy itself.
“To me … this is definitely evil against good,” Routh told Newsweek in 2022, adding, “It seems asinine that we have a leader in a country that does not understand … basic moral values.”
In the article, Routh blasted world leaders for not sending military help, saying, “We're going to have to elect new leaders … that have a backbone and have the fortitude to say, 'Hey, we're not going to tolerate this type of behavior.' ” But meantime, Routh said, civilians have to “get off the couch” and “pick up the torch.”
“Are we going to stand for humanity, for human rights, for everything that is good in the world or are we just going to ignore it?” he said, adding, “It blows my mind that I'm standing here alone without thousands of people from every country, from everywhere. We need everybody here."
Ukraine's International Legion denies Routh’s claims that he was working for them.
Months later, in a self-published Amazon e-book titled Ukraine’s Unwinnable War, Routh questioned why Russian President Vladimir Putin had not been assassinated, and suggested Trump might deserve the same fate.
When Routh was arrested in Sunday's alleged assassination attempt in Florida, Rasecke, the retired police officer, says it was shocking to him. But only sort of.
“I mean, considering how things were progressively going downhill with him, it does make sense,” Rasecke said. “The dots connect. And I can see where this could have actually happened."
Routh’s family members didn't respond to repeated requests from NPR for comment. But one of his sons told CNN that Routh is “a loving and caring father, and honest hardworking man […] It doesn’t sound like the man I know to do anything crazy, much less violent.”
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