The two cross-dressing young men who had spent the night at a nearby motel with an older man and stole his car on Monday morning might not have known exactly where they were going. However, they sped into a special highway exit reserved for employees of the US National Security Agency (NSA).
The agency, the country’s largest and most secretive intelligence organization, is protected by its own police force on a sprawling Maryland campus and is on permanent alert against intruders. The encounter ended with both men shot, one fatally, by agency security personnel, authorities said.
“There’s still a lot of investigating to do, but it seems very possible that they didn’t set out to go to NSA,” a law enforcement official who was briefed on the episode said.
Officials said they found cocaine and at least one firearm in the stolen Ford Escape SUV, which was perhaps why the driver did not obey orders from NSA officers to stop. Officials identified the wounded passenger in the stolen car as Kevin Fleming, 20, of nearby Baltimore. The identity of the driver, who was pronounced dead at the scene, was not disclosed by late Monday.
Initial reports suggested that the men were shot as they tried to crash the secure entrance.
However, in a statement on Monday afternoon, NSA spokesman Jonathan Freed described a more complicated encounter.
Freed said the car approached an NSA gate shortly after 9am and “the driver failed to obey an NSA police officer’s routine instructions for safely exiting the secure campus.”
“The vehicle failed to stop and barriers were deployed,” he said. After that, the car “accelerated toward an NSA police vehicle blocking the road. NSA police fired at the vehicle when it refused to stop.”
The two men’s vehicle crashed into the police car, the statement said. One NSA police officer was injured in the collision and was taken to the hospital.
However, for much of the morning the sketchy news reports from NSA suggested the possibility of a terrorist assault. Dozens of emergency vehicles rushed to the scene. Guards with automatic weapons patrolled the area. Television networks dispatched helicopters to film the chaotic scene from above.
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