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 & Recordreported.

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,