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 & Record reported.
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the machine gun, as well as resisting, delaying and obstructing a law enforcement officer and driving while his license was revoked.
“All I know is that I got woken up one morning with the news that he had got arrested and the guys needed work orders, so I went and got the work orders,” Cooper said. “He had threatened to blow up the entire Greensboro Police Department, that was all documented in the police reports.”
A judge handed down a suspended sentence and probation to Routh, who avoided prison altogether, court records show.
In an interview with Wired, Tracy Fulk, the officer who arrested Routh that day said, “I figured he was either dead or in prison by now. I had no clue that he had moved on and was continuing his escapades.”
Fulk said Routh had been involved in other standoffs, and that officers “always knew he had weapons.” Routh’s rap sheet dates back to the early 1980s, with dozens of charges for vehicular offenses including DUIs.
“All we can do is arrest them and then obviously it goes into the court system and they decide all of that,” Fulk told Wired. “It’s frustrating at times.”
For Cooper, her role at United Roofing quickly turned into a much bigger one than first expected, as she functioned as a personal assistant to Routh.
“[I would] pick him up, take him to do estimates, pick up the payroll, pay the guys, pick up the kids, take them shopping for their school clothes,” Cooper recalled. “Lora, his ex-wife, she was sweet.”
In 2004, Cooper was terminated without warning, she said, explaining, “My sister Theresa had been stealing the car in the middle of the night and running out all the gas.”
When the car transmission eventually blew, Routh blamed Cooper, “and I got fired,” she went on. This prompted a “falling out” between the two of them, according to Cooper, who said, “He wouldn’t even speak to me when I’d run into him at the store.”
At the same time, Cooper also described Routh as “a good guy.” He didn’t have any strong political views that she knew of, she said, adding that he seemed primarily focused on “money, jobs,” and the crew of 40 who worked for him.
“He done what he could for people,” she said. “That’s why I don’t understand what’s going on with him.”
According to a 2001 article in the News & Record, when Routh saw a nearby resident’s house in poor repair, he gathered a crew of volunteers from his church and workers from United Roofing to fix up the man’s home, free of charge.
“With all the resources we have nowadays, there’s no reason anybody should live like this,” Routh told the outlet.
Cooper moved to Hawaii in 2018 to try his hand at building affordable housing, according to his LinkedIn profile. Cooper said she hasn’t seen him or spoken to him since.
“What drives people to do stupid shit in this day and time?” Cooper wondered. “I mean, come on now.”