Aug. 12, 2025:
ATLANTA (AP) — The man who fired more than 180 shots with a long gun at the headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broke into a locked safe to get his father’s weapons and wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines, authorities said Tuesday (Aug. 12, 2025).
Documents found in a search of the home where Patrick Joseph White had lived with his parents “expressed the shooter’s discontent with the COVID-19 vaccinations,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.
White, 30, had written about wanting to make “the public aware of his discontent with the vaccine,” Hosey added.
White also had recently verbalized thoughts of suicide, which led to law enforcement being contacted several weeks before the shooting, Hosey said. He died at the scene Friday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after killing DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose.
The shooting reflects the dangers public health leaders have been experiencing around the country since anti-vaccine vitriol took root during the pandemic. Such rhetoric has been amplified as President Donald Trump’s Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., repeatedly makes false and misleading statements about the safety of immunizations.
“We know that misinformation can be dangerous. Not only to health, but to those that trust us and those we want to trust,” Dr. Susan Monarez told CDC employees in an ‘all-hands’ meeting Tuesday, her first since the attack capped her first full week on campus as the CDC’s director.
“We need to rebuild the trust together,” Monarez said, according to a transcript obtained by the AP. “The trust is what binds us. In moments like this, we must meet the challenges with rational, evidence based discourse spoken with compassion and understanding. That is how we will lead.”
White’s parents have fully cooperated with the investigation of their son, who had no known criminal history, Hosey said at the Tuesday news briefing. With a search warrant at the family’s home in the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, authorities recovered written documents and electronic devices that are being analyzed. Investigators also recovered five firearms, including a gun of his father’s that he used in the attack, Hosey said.
White did not have a key to the gun safe, Hosey said: “He broke into it.”
CDC security guards stopped White from driving into the campus on Friday before he parked near a pharmacy across the street and opened fire from a sidewalk. The bullets pierced “blast-resistant” windows across the campus, pinning employees down during the barrage. More than 500 shell casings were recovered, the GBI said.
In the aftermath, CDC officials are assessing campus security and encouraging staff to alert authorities to any new threats, including those based on misinformation regarding the CDC and its vaccine work.
“We’ve not seen an uptick, although any rhetoric that suggests or leads to violence is something we take very seriously.” said FBI Special Agent Paul Brown, who leads the agency’s Atlanta division.
Jeff Williams, who oversees safety at the CDC, told employees there is “no information suggesting additional threats currently.”
“This is a targeted attack on the CDC related to COVID-19,” Williams said. “All indications are that this was an isolated event involving one individual.”
The fact that CDC’s security stopped him from entering the campus “prevented what I can only imagine to be a lot of casualties,” Williams said.
“Nearly 100 children at the childcare center were reunited with their parents at the end of the night,” he said. “The protections we have in place did an excellent job.”
Kennedy toured the CDC campus on Monday, accompanied Monarez. “No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others,” Kennedy said in a statement Saturday, without addressing the potential impact of anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Kennedy refused to directly answer when asked during an interview with Scripps News on Monday what message he had for CDC employees who are worried about the culture of misinformation and skepticism around vaccines.
Although law enforcement officials have made clear the shooter was targeting the public health agency over the COVID-19 vaccine, Kennedy said in the interview that not enough was known about his motives. He described political violence as “wrong,” but went on to criticize the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The government was overreaching in its efforts to persuade the public to get vaccinated and they were saying things that are not always true,” Kennedy said.
Some unionized CDC employees called for more protections, and some who recently left amid widespread layoffs squarely blamed Kennedy.
Years of false rhetoric about vaccines and public health was bound to “take a toll on people’s mental health,” and “leads to violence,” said Tim Young, a CDC employee who retired in April.
August 11, 2025:
ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia man who had blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal has been identified as the shooter who opened fire late Friday (Aug. 8, 2025) on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, killing a police officer.
The 30-year-old suspect, who died during the incident, had also tried to get into the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta but was stopped by guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street and opening fire, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Saturday.
The man, identified as Patrick Joseph White, was armed with five guns, including at least one long gun, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation.
A union representing workers at the CDC said the incident was not random and “compounds months of mistreatment, neglect, and vilification that CDC staff have endured.” It demanded federal officials condemn vaccine misinformation, saying it was putting scientists at risk.
August 9, 2025:
ATLANTA (AP) — Investigators identified a 30-year-old man from suburban Atlanta on Saturday as the person who opened fire on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, killing a police officer and spreading panic through the health agency and nearby Emory University.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the shooter Friday was Patrick Joseph White of Kennesaw, Georgia. Officer David Rose of the DeKalb County Police Department was shot and mortally wounded while responding. No one else was hit, although police said four people reported to emergency rooms with symptoms of anxiety. Many CDC employees sought cover in their offices as bullets strafed the CDC’s headquarters.
Police say White opened fire at the campus from across the street, leaving gaping bullet holes in windows and littering the sidewalk outside a CVS pharmacy with bullet casings. The attack prompted a massive law enforcement response to one of the nation’s most prominent public health institutions.
At least four CDC buildings were hit, Director Susan Monarez said in a post on X, and dozens of impacts were visible from outside the campus. Images shared by employees showed bullet-pocked windows in multiple agency buildings where thousands of scientists and staff work on critical disease research.
“We are deeply saddened by the tragic shooting at CDC’s Atlanta campus that took the life of officer David Rose,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said Saturday.
“We know how shaken our public health colleagues feel today. No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others,” his statement said.
Hundreds of CDC staffers sheltered in place during the shooting and many couldn’t leave for hours afterward on Friday as investigators interviewed witnesses and gathered evidence. The staff was told to work from home or take leave on Monday.
CDC workers already faced uncertain futures due to funding cuts, layoffs and political disputes over their agency’s mission. “Save the CDC” signs are common in some Atlanta-area neighborhoods, and a group of laid-off employees has been demanding action from elected officials to push back against the Trump administration’s cuts.
This shooting was the “physical embodiment of the narrative that has taken over, attacking science, and attacking our federal workers,” said Sarah Boim, a former CDC communications staffer who was fired this year during wave of terminations.
“It’s devastating,” said Boim, who helped to start the advocacy organization for the former employees called Fired But Fighting. “When I saw the picture of those windows having been struck by bullets I really lost it,” she said, her voice cracking.
Without naming White Friday night, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens described him as a “known person that may have, some interest in certain things.” But Dickens did not name a motive.
A neighbor of White told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that White spoke with her multiple times about his distrust of COVID-19 vaccines.
Nancy Hoalst, who lives in same cul-de-sac as White’s family, said he was friendly and “seemed like a good guy” doing yardwork and walking dogs for neighbors. But Hoalst said White would bring up vaccines even in unrelated conversations.
“He was very unsettled and he very deeply believed that vaccines hurt him and were hurting other people.” Hoalst told the Atlanta newspaper. “He emphatically believed that.”
But Hoalst said she never believed White would be violent: “I had no idea he thought he would take it out on the CDC.”
A voicemail left at a phone number listed for White’s family in public records was not immediately returned Saturday morning.
The gunman died at the scene, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said Friday, adding: “we do not know at this time whether that was from officers or if it was self-inflicted.”
He had been armed with a long gun, and authorities recovered three other firearms at the scene, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
The CVS remained closed Saturday morning, with one bullet hole in its front door and two more in a rear door. A lone bouquet was placed outside the building.
Rose, 33, was a former Marine who served in Afghanistan and graduated from the police academy in March and “quickly earned the respect of his colleagues for his dedication, courage and professionalism,” DeKalb County said in a statement.
“This evening, there is a wife without a husband. There are three children, one unborn, without a father,” DeKalb County CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson said.
Outside the complex that includes the CVS and four floors of apartments above the store, some people came to witness what had happened.
Sam Atkins, who lives in Stone Mountain, said gun violence feels like “a fact of life” now: “This is an everyday thing that happens here in Georgia.”
The newly-confirmed Monarez hailed the police response and called off in-person work on Monday, telling staff in a Friday email that the shooting brought “fear, anger and worry to all of us.”
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