The gunman who targeted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters earlier this month, shooting hundreds of bullets at the building and killing a police officer, likely attempted to enter the agency’s campus days before the shooting, officials said Thursday.
In an email to employees that was reviewed by NOTUS, the CDC’s top safety official, Jeff Williams, called the news a “distressing development” but said the fact that the shooter was not able to access the building was “a testament to the strength of our protocols.”
Security footage showed what appears to be Patrick Joseph White attempting to enter a CDC visitor center on Aug. 6, two days before the shooting took place, Williams said in the email. Williams wrote that the video evidence “does not 100% confirm the person’s identity” but that CDC’s office of safety and Georgia’s Bureau of Investigation believe the “likelihood is very high” that the person in the video was the gunman. He was turned away by the guards without incident, Williams writes.
“The probing of a site is a common practice for individuals planning to engage in violent acts. It is usually the last phase before actually carrying out an attack,” Williams wrote.
The news of the shooter’s earlier attempt to enter CDC campus was first reported by STAT News.
One police officer, David Rose, was killed while responding to the Aug. 8 attack, during which White fired over 500 bullets at CDC headquarters from a sidewalk across the street. White died by suicide following the shooting.
A CDC employee told NOTUS earlier this week that cleanup was still ongoing, and that they had not yet noticed any increased security measures. STAT News reported Thursday that CDC would boost security in response to the shooting.
Health and Human Services employees have called for a stronger response to the shooting from department leadership including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A letter published yesterday and signed by over 700 former and current department staff said the attack “came amid growing mistrust in public institutions, driven by politicized rhetoric that has turned public health professionals from trusted experts into targets of villainization — and now, violence.”
A spokesperson for HHS told NOTUS after the letter’s publication that “for the first time in its 70-year history, the mission of HHS is truly resonating with the American people.”
“Any attempt to conflate widely supported public health reforms with the violence of a suicidal mass shooter is an attempt to politicize a tragedy,” they continued.
The shooter was reportedly motivated by a belief that he had suffered injuries caused by a COVID-19 vaccine. In the days after the shooting, Kennedy decried the violence while also reiterating his decision to pull funding from mRNA vaccine development projects.