Officer injured, one person in custody in shooting incident near NSA security gate
Fort Meade MD Feb 15 2018
Two men were in federal custody on Wednesday and a third man was recovering from injuries after authorities said the driver of a rented sport utility vehicle tried to enter a secured area of the top-secret National Security Agency.
Officials said that in addition, an NSA police officer and a bystander were injured during the confrontation that ended at a visitor’s gate to the sprawling listening post on Fort George G. Meade off the Baltimore Washington Parkway.
Gunshots were fired at the SUV during the incident that occurred just before 7 a.m., but authorities said they do not believe any of the people injured were struck by bullets. The bystander and officer were not seriously injured, officials said. The driver’s condition was not disclosed.
Television images showed a black SUV with bullet holes in its windshield crashed into a concrete barrier at the gate. Gordon Johnson, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office, said that “preliminarily, gunfire was directed at the vehicle.” He declined to say whether any NSA police officers fired at the SUV.
The early morning security breach forced authorities to shut down Route 32, a major east-west highway that cuts through Anne Arundel County, and raised fears of an attack.
Officials quickly determined that was no threat. An FBI spokesman, David Fitz, said authorities ran the names of the three occupants of the SUV through databases and came up with no link to terrorism.
Johnson said agents were in the process of interviewing the three occupants and searching the SUV. “This is part of our investigation, to understand what happened here today,” he said. “We are trying to talk to them to find out why they were here.”
It is not uncommon for motorists to take a wrong exit off the Parkway and end up at the NSA. A brown sign, similar to those used to mark national parks, says “NSA” and has an arrow pointing up the exit ramp to the site. Below the “NSA”, in large type, the sign states “Restricted Entrance.”
Most drivers who take the exit in error are turned around by heavily armed police. In March 2015, a 27-year-old man died after the stolen SUV he was in crashed outside the NSA. Ricky S. Hall was one of two men that police fired on as vehicle he was in hit a police cruiser before he made it on to the NSA campus.
Officials in that incident said the driver may have mistakenly taken a restricted exit to an NSA security post and ignored police orders to stop, possibly because there were drugs inside the SUV and they had just left a motel and the vehicle’s owner, who had picked them up in Baltimore for an overnight tryst.
Johnson told reporters that the origins of Wednesday’s incident remain unclear. He would not say if there had been a pursuit at any point and did not explain the odd position of the SUV after the incident. It was pointed against the direction of traffic flow into an entry gate lined with vehicles waiting clearance to move through to a reach the parking lot. The SUV abutted a fence after crashing into a white concrete Jersey barrier — labeled “NSA” — that had knocked several feet.
It appeared from television video that the passenger-side air bag had deployed,and several bullet holes were in the windshield. Fitz, the FBI spokesman, said the SUV “came on campus and tried to leave.”
At least one person was seen in handcuffs shortly after the incident ended
Washington Post
