News reports published today have alleged that the White House fence jumper, Omar Gonzalez, who very nearly made his way right inside the oval office last week, was only stopped due to an alert off-duty agent who was leaving for the night.
Having scaled the perimeter fence, Gonzalez actually entered the White House and sprinted down the main floor before being tackled by the off-duty agent in one of the internal rooms.
Gonzalez is the first person in modern history to have jumped the White House fence and enter the premises, mainly due to massive holes in security, particularly around the northern fence.
Even though officials at the White House said following the incident that the intruder was detained before he entered the property itself, The Washington Post reported yesterday that Gonzalez did, in fact, make it into the building and was only tackled on the southern side of the 80-foot-long East Room.
The new revelations about how close the intruder came to gaining access to the personal living quarters of the Obamas came as Secret Service Director Julia Pierson was being grilled on Capitol Hill about the incident and other security lapses revealed in various reports over the last few days.
The reports go back to the November of 2011 incident, when a man fired a semiautomatic rifle into the White House while Sasha Obama was home.
It did come to light that no Secret Service agents are assigned to guard the steps to the Obama family’s private living quarters when the family is not in the complex.
A person who works in the White House, but who wished to remain anonymous, said, “There’s no telling how long this guy could have run around if the detail guy hadn’t happened to be there.”
No doubt, the relevant people at the White House will take the appropriate steps to ensure that incidents of this type are not allowed to occur in the future.
