The man who fired more than 500 rounds at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appears to have tried to get onto the agency’s campus two days before the August 8 shooting, according to an agency email obtained by CNN.
During the investigation, the CDC’s Office of Safety, Security, and Asset Management and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation discovered video footage that shows a man resembling the shooter, Patrick Joseph White, trying to enter the CDC’s main campus on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 6.
He tried to enter the campus at the first guard station but was turned away by CDC security “without incident.” The shooter did not attempt to enter the campus on Friday, August 8, prior to the attack, the email said.
“The video evidence does not 100% confirm the person’s identity,” the email reads, but authorities believe the likelihood that it’s White is very high.
According to the email, which was sent to employees by Jeff Williams, CDC’s head of security, it’s not uncommon for shooters to “probe” or scout a scene before an attack.
“This is an understandably distressing development, and we want to emphasize that CDC security measures were effective,” the email said.
The agency email was first reported by STAT and Atlanta’s 11Alive News.
Before the shooting, White, 30, broke into his father’s safe and took five guns. He killed DeKalb County Police Office David Rose and sprayed several agency buildings with bullets as employees were preparing to leave campus for the weekend. Instead, employees described taking cover under their desks as bullets whizzed over their heads.
One staffer later said in an all-hands meeting that they felt like “sitting ducks.”
In the aftermath of the attack, CDC staff said they were not surprised to have become the targets of a violent attack after being smeared by federal officials as corrupt. On Wednesday, more than 750 HHS employees sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. imploring them to stop spreading false information about vaccines and denigrating public health workers.
The letter, also addressed to members of Congress, noted “the violent August 8th attack on CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta was not random.” The Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported that the shooter had expressed discontent with the Covid-19 vaccine and wanted to make his distrust known.
An HHS spokesperson provided a statement from the department in response to the letter saying Kennedy “is standing firmly with CDC employees – both on the ground and across every center – ensuring their safety and well-being remain a top priority. In the wake of this heartbreaking shooting, he traveled to Atlanta to offer his support and reaffirm his deep respect, calling the CDC ‘a shining star among global health agencies.’”
The statement continued on to say that “for the first time in its 70-year history, the mission of HHS is truly resonating with the American people – driven by President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s bold commitment to Make America Healthy Again. Any attempt to conflate widely supported public health reforms with the violence of a suicidal mass shooter is an attempt to politicize a tragedy.”
In an additional blow, roughly 600 CDC staff who had been placed on administrative leave earlier this year began received official termination notices this week. On Thursday, the CDC’s Union said it had not been given advanced notice of the terminations and didn’t have a full list of the programs affected. Some of the terminated staffers worked in the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention.
“The cruel decision to move forward with these unlawful separations immediately after a violent attack on campus contradicts their stated commitments to promote the recovery of CDC staff and undermines the stability of our Agency. The decision to compound this trauma is not an oversight: this was a shameful, active choice. It must be reversed,” according to a statement from the American Federation of Government Employees, local 2883.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the AFGE’s statement.
