ATLANTA (AP) — The man who fired more than 180 shots with a long gun at the headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broke into a locked safe to get his father's weapons and wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines, authorities said Tuesday.
Documents found in a search of the home where Patrick Joseph White had lived with his parents “expressed the shooter’s discontent with the COVID-19 vaccinations,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.
White, 30, had written about wanting to make “the public aware of his discontent with the vaccine,” Hosey added.
White also had recently verbalized thoughts of suicide, which led to law enforcement being contacted several weeks before the shooting, Hosey said. He died at the scene Friday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after killing DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose.
The shooting reflects the dangers public health leaders have been experiencing around the country since anti-vaccine vitriol took root during the pandemic. Such rhetoric has been amplified as President Donald Trump's Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., repeatedly makes false and misleading statements about the safety of immunizations.
Dr. Susan Monarez held her first all-staff meeting on Tuesday after the attack capped her first full week on campus as the CDC’s director.
“We know that misinformation can be dangerous. Not only to health, but to those that trust us and those we want to trust,” Monarez told employees, according to a transcript obtained by the AP.
“We need to rebuild the trust together,” she said. “The trust is what binds us. In moments like this, we must meet the challenges with rational, evidence based discourse spoken with compassion and understanding. That is how we will lead.”
White's parents have fully cooperated with the investigation of their son, who had no known criminal history, Hosey said at the Tuesday news briefing. With a search warrant at the family's home in the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, authorities recovered written documents and electronic devices that are being analyzed. Investigators also recovered five firearms, including a gun of his father's that he used in the attack, Hosey said.
White did not have a key to the gun safe, Hosey said: “He broke into it.”
CDC security guards stopped White from driving into the campus on Friday before he parked near a pharmacy across the street and opened fire from a sidewalk. The bullets pierced “blast-resistant” windows across the campus, pinning employees down during the barrage. More than 500 shell casings were recovered, the GBI said.
In the aftermath, CDC officials are assessing campus security and encouraging staff to alert authorities to any new threats, including those based on misinformation regarding the CDC and its vaccine work.
“We’ve not seen an uptick, although any rhetoric that suggests or leads to violence is something we take very seriously.” said FBI Special Agent Paul Brown, who leads the agency's Atlanta division.
Jeff Williams, who oversees safety at the CDC, told employees there is “no information suggesting additional threats currently.”
“This is a targeted attack on the CDC related to COVID-19," Williams said. “All indications are that this was an isolated event involving one individual.”
The fact that CDC's security stopped him from entering the campus “prevented what I can only imagine to be a lot of casualties," Williams said.
“Nearly 100 children at the childcare center were reunited with their parents at the end of the night,” he said. "The protections we have in place did an excellent job.”
Kennedy toured the CDC campus on Monday, accompanied Monarez. “No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others,” Kennedy said in a statement Saturday, without addressing the potential impact of anti-vaccine rhetoric. Kennedy also visited the DeKalb County Police Department, and later met privately with the slain officer’s wife.
A photo of the suspect was released Tuesday, Hosey said, but he encouraged the public to remember the face of the officer instead.
Kennedy was a leader in a national anti-vaccine movement before President Donald Trump selected him to oversee federal health agencies, and has made false and misleading statements about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 shots and other vaccines.
Some unionized CDC employees called for more protections. Some employees who recently left the agency as the Trump administration pursues widespread layoffs, meanwhile, squarely blamed Kennedy.
Years of false rhetoric about vaccines and public health was bound to “take a toll on people’s mental health,” and “leads to violence,” said Tim Young, a CDC employee who retired in April.
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Associated Press Writer Michelle R. Smith contributed from Providence, Rhode Island.
