‘Show Me Your Hands!’: Officer Recalls 2002 Standoff With Trump Suspect

The police department in Greensboro, N.C., was on the lookout for Ryan W. Routh. He didn’t have a driver’s license, and investigators suspected he had an explosive device. So when Officer Tracy Fulk saw him driving near the Greensboro Coliseum on a cold day in December 2002, she pulled him over.

As she got close to his small pickup, Ms. Fulk said, she saw Mr. Routh reaching for a duffel bag beside him. He opened it, revealing a firearm.

“Show me your hands!” she recalled screaming at him. Mr. Routh sped off toward his roofing business in the central North Carolina city, where he barricaded himself inside with a fully automatic weapon, according to a local news report.

Ms. Fulk, who retired in 2017 after nearly two decades on the force, recounted the confrontation in an interview with The New York Times. Mr. Routh now faces federal weapons charges in Florida after what the authorities have described as an apparent attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump.

She recalled Mr. Routh walking back and forth inside his business, occasionally looking out the window at the dozens of officers who had established a perimeter around the building. After about two hours, he walked out — without a gun — and was arrested, Ms. Fulk said.

“He didn’t say a whole lot,” she said, noting that Mr. Routh had “acted like he had some sort of mental health issues.”

Mr. Routh was charged with “possessing a weapon of mass death and destruction,” a felony. Court documents reviewed by The New York Times on Tuesday describe the weapon as a “binary explosive with a 10-inch detonation and a blasting cap.” He was convicted and placed on supervised probation for 60 months.

The court also ordered him not to operate a firearm, and to get a mental