On Tuesday evening, as tourists snapped photos in front of the White House, a young man with blond hair and blue eyes approached the black iron fence.
Kyle Odom wasn’t there to take pictures, though.
He was there to deliver a message to the president.
A Secret Service agent spotted Odom tossing something over the fence and approached him. When the agent ran his name through a law enforcement database, a red flag popped up: an arrest warrant issued just two days earlier on the other side of the country.
The charge: attempted murder.
Arriving seemingly out of nowhere, Odom was arrested at the White House, bringing a sudden end to a two-day hunt for the Marine veteran.
It also provided a bizarre coda to an already baffling crime saga, one that stretched from rural Idaho to the nation’s capital and potentially threatened the lives of 50 members of Congress....
Remington, who survived the point-blank shooting in what one church member called a “miracle,” had appeared a day earlier with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) at an event hosted by his presidential campaign. That led to speculation that the shooting was politically motivated.
But Odom’s manifesto suggests that the shooting, if he did it, was something else entirely: the act of an unraveling mind.
The 21-page manifesto, which authorities say Odom sent to his parents as well as several Idaho television stations, is a window into what he was thinking.
According to Coeur d’Alene police, Odom has a history of mental illness. In his manifesto, he outlined his path to Sunday’s shooting in clear but increasingly paranoid prose.
He admitted to plotting to shoot Remington. He also claimed that the pastor was part of a vast alien conspiracy to enslave the human race — a conspiracy that Odom believed extended to Congress.
“My last resort was to take actions to bring this to the public’s attention,” Odom wrote in the manifesto. “I hope that something good comes of it. Just realize that I’m a good person, and I’m completely innocent. Also realize that the ‘people’ I killed are not what you think.”
And the manifesto includes a really creepy drawing of the Martian. The rest of the article is textbook schizophrenia: mind control, elaborate conspiracy involving members of Congress and Martians sniffing him.
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