A 22-year-old man suspected of running over an 80-year-old Trump supporter called the police to confess and then apparently took his own life, according to the authorities.
The 80-year-old man was run over and critically injured by an all-terrain vehicle while putting a Trump sign in his yard in Hancock, Michigan, on Sunday (July 21).
His suspected assailant was found dead at his home from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound on Monday.
‘Politically motivated’
According to the police, before running over the 80-year-old, the young man vandalized two parked cars, smashing the windows of one that displayed a Trump sticker, and damaging the tyres of another that had a sticker supporting the police.
The police said the crimes, caught on camera, appeared to be politically motivated.
The 80-year-old man was taken to hospital with critical injuries after being struck from behind by the suspect’s ATV.
On Monday, police said they were contacted by a man who said he wanted to “confess a crime involving an ATV driver within the last 24 hours.” The man told police to “send someone to pick me up”.
Responding officers visited the man’s home about two miles from where the elderly man was run over. There, they found a 22-year-old man dead from what appeared to be a single self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The incident occurred only a week after a 20-year-old gunman attempted to kill Donald Trump at a political rally in Pennsylvania on July 13. A bullet grazed Trump’s right ear. The gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead at the scene by a Secret Service sniper.
The Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned following the security failure to prevent the assassination attempt.
Political violence upsurge
Violence plagued American politics long before the attempt on Trump, reports AP.
Members of Congress have been shot. Democratic U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords was wounded in a 2011 shooting outside an Arizona grocery store. Republican U.S. Representative Steve Scalise, now House majority leader, was shot in 2017 while practising for a charity baseball game. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was the target of a foiled kidnapping plot uncovered in 2020.
A man with a hammer bludgeoned the husband of the then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, in their San Francisco home in 2022.
Reuters reported in August 2023 that it had identified 213 cases of political violence since the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol, which left five people dead. The post-Capitol violence killed at least 39 people, the Reuters report added.
Threats against members of Congress are up nearly tenfold since 2015, with more than 8,000 reported last year, reports Time, quoting the U.S. Capitol Police. Serious threats against federal judges that trigger an investigation rose from 179 in 2019 to 457 in 2023. In a survey conducted earlier this year, more than 40 per cent of state legislators reported being threatened or attacked during the past three years; nearly 90 per cent said they had suffered other forms of abuse, including harassment, intimidation, and stalking.