A Man Was Found Asleep in a Pickup Near the White House — Then He Told Officers What Was in the Brown Bag

It was 11:42 on a Thursday night, and the blue Ford F-150 on Constitution Avenue wasn’t going anywhere.

A Secret Service officer on patrol near the White House complex walked up to the pickup and found a man asleep inside, according to a police affidavit filed in court and described by NBC News. The officer woke him. At first, investigators say, it looked like a routine welfare check: a tired driver, a parked truck, a few blocks from the most heavily guarded home in America.

Then the officer asked the question every officer asks. Was he OK? Did he have any weapons?

According to the affidavit, as reported by ABC News, the man shook his head yes — and made a finger gun with his hand.

What happened over the next few minutes would end with a 26-year-old Venezuelan man in handcuffs, three firearms laid out for an official government photo, and the Department of Homeland Security announcing that he had come to Washington to kill President Donald Trump. But the court papers tell a stranger, sadder and more confusing story than the headline — one that starts with a phone, a translation app and a paper bag.

The Words That Came Out of the Phone

The man, identified by DHS as Ronny Yordrix Guanipa Chrinos (ABC News spells it Guanipa-Chrinos), did not try to drive away. He did not run. According to the affidavit, he got out of the truck and began talking to officers the only way he apparently could: by typing into Google Translate and holding up the result.

He said he had weapons, and he wanted to turn them over to the government, the affidavit says.

The sentences that appeared on the screen next have now been printed by outlets across the country. “I have the item they wanted to kill me over, along with the outfit to go with it; if you want, I can hand it over without putting up any resistance,” he wrote, according to the court document quoted by NBC News.

And then, the line that told officers exactly where to look: “I have the gun because they tried to kill me with it, and I had to take it away from them; it’s in the brown bag.”

What Officers Found Inside the Truck

Inside the pickup, investigators found three guns, according to the affidavit and DHS: an AR-15-style rifle, a MAC-10 and a Glock 43X pistol. DHS said officers also recovered “dozens of rounds of ammunition,” and released a photo of the weapons.

The truck had been reported stolen, officials said.

DHS’s account of the conversation went further than the affidavit. In a statement released Friday, the department said that when officers confronted him, “he said that he heard voices in his head telling him to come to Washington, D.C. and kill President Trump.”

He was arrested on the spot. He now faces a long list of charges, according to DHS: carrying a rifle outside a home or business, three counts of unlawful transportation of a firearm, three counts of unregistered firearms, three counts of unregistered ammunition, possession of certain dangerous weapons, carrying a pistol without a license, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, theft and receiving stolen property. None of the charges DHS listed is a threat charge. NBC News reported it was not clear whether he had a lawyer who could speak for him. Like anyone charged with a crime, he is presumed innocent.

The Detail the Court Papers Leave Out

Here is where the two official versions begin to pull apart.

ABC News, which reviewed the complaint affidavit filed in D.C. Superior Court, reported that the document does not include the alleged remarks about voices telling him to kill Trump. That claim comes from the DHS statement. The affidavit instead paints a picture of a man who, by his own account, was frightened of someone else — a man who said people had tried to kill him with the very gun he was now handing over.

He also gave investigators an explanation for the truck. According to the affidavit, as reported by NBC News, he said it belonged to his boss, who had lent it to him. He said he had bought the weapons about a month earlier. And he said he had been living in the vehicle.

DHS says he entered the United States illegally through Texas in March 2024, was arrested by the Border Patrol and was later released. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lodged a detainer against him, the department said, and he is being held by the U.S. Marshals Service. According to ABC News, he made his first appearance in D.C. Superior Court on Friday and is being held without bond. A federal law enforcement source told NBC News that prosecutors are reviewing the evidence and that he is due in federal court on Monday.

“Alarmed by the Increase”

For the Secret Service, the arrest is another sign of a problem its leaders say is getting worse, not better.

“This incident reflects the heightened threat environment in which we operate, as well as the continued number of armed individuals who are drawn to the White House complex,” Secret Service Director Sean Curran said in the DHS statement. “While our personnel are trained to respond to situations like this and we remain confident in our tactics, we are alarmed by the increase in threat cases that continue to arise.”

Curran said the agency would keep “expanding our focus on proactively investigating and identifying individuals who make threats to our protectees, in order to disrupt threats before they arrive in Washington.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin praised the officers who made the arrest. “Thanks to our brave Secret Service officers, this illegal alien with three firearms in his vehicle was arrested near the White House before he could harm anyone,” he said.

A Knock on the Window

No shots were fired. Nobody was hurt. Curran called it a “volatile situation that posed an imminent threat” — and, in his telling, a patrol that worked exactly the way it is supposed to.

But it is hard to shake the image at the center of it: a young man asleep in a borrowed, reportedly stolen truck a short walk from the White House, waking to a knock on the window, lifting his hand into the shape of a gun — and then reaching for his phone to type out, in a language that wasn’t his, where the real one was hidden.

On Monday, a federal courtroom may start to explain which version of that night is true.