Michelle Obama found out about the bullet holes in her family's home from a White House usher. The First Family was not in residence that night - November 11, 2011 - because Barack Obama was on a state visit abroad. But the couple's youngest daughter, Sasha, was in the White House. Her grandmother, Marian Shields Robinson, was with her. And on the night of the eleventh, at around nine o'clock, a 21-year-old man named Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez had stopped his Honda on Constitution Avenue south of the South Lawn, sighted a Romanian-made semi-automatic rifle out the window, and squeezed off at least eight rounds at the White House residence. Seven of them hit the second floor. One broke a window. Another lodged in the window frame of the Yellow Oval Room. Nobody was hurt. Nobody on the Obama protective detail recognized that the building had been struck. It took the Secret Service four days to figure it out.
On the night of November 11, Secret Service officers and Park Police on the National Mall heard what they took to be a brief gunfight - several rounds, then another vehicle accelerating away. Initial witness accounts suggested the shots had been fired from one black vehicle at another, a possible gang shooting on Constitution Avenue. By morning the Secret Service had decided there was no security threat to the White House. Sasha Obama and her grandmother went about their day. It was a White House usher who finally noticed something on the morning of November 15, four days after the shooting. A broken window. A bullet lodged where it should not have been. Other rounds, found later, had cracked the historic glass of the Truman Balcony, broken a ballistic windowpane, and hit the exterior of the residence. Forensic technicians eventually counted at least seven impacts. Michelle Obama, told of the situation by the usher, summoned Mark J. Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service. She wanted to know how this had been missed.
Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez had left his home in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on October 23, telling his friends and family he was going to Utah on a business trip. When he failed to come home, his family reported him missing on October 31. He drove east. Along the way he posted videos and writings revealing what those who knew him would later confirm: he believed he was Jesus Christ, that President Obama was the Antichrist, and that he had been sent to confront him. He was not affiliated with any extremist movement. He was, by every account, a young man with severe untreated mental illness who had constructed a religious justification for what he was about to do. On the morning of the shooting, he was reported for suspicious behavior in a Washington park. Police questioned him. He refused to let them search his car, which held the rifle, and they let him go. That afternoon he drove to a stretch of Constitution Avenue with a clear sight line to the White House residence and opened fire.
Ortega-Hernandez did not stay around to see what he had done. He fled west by car. The Secret Service investigation was reopened in earnest on November 15 once the impacts were found. Five days later, on November 16, an employee at a hotel in Indiana, Pennsylvania - 230 miles northwest of Washington - recognized him from a news bulletin and called police. He was arrested without incident. Carol Leonnig, the Washington Post reporter who would later write the definitive account of the case, called his arrest sheer luck. Agents recovered the rifle. Ortega-Hernandez was charged with nineteen counts including attempting to assassinate the President of the United States, which carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. In September 2013 he accepted a plea bargain. He pled guilty to two charges: destruction of property and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. The assassination charge was dropped. On March 31, 2014, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer sentenced him to 25 years. He is serving his term at the Federal Correctional Institution at Herlong, California. His scheduled release date is June 21, 2033.
On September 27, 2014, Carol Leonnig published her Washington Post investigative report on what the Secret Service had failed to do on the night of the shooting. Officers on the South Lawn had heard the gunfire and reported it. A supervisor had insisted, against the evidence, that the rounds had been fired between two vehicles in a gang dispute. Junior agents who suspected otherwise were overruled. The bullet impacts were not searched for. The First Family's safety was assumed without confirmation. By the time the report ran, a different director - Julia Pierson, who had succeeded Sullivan - was overseeing the agency, and a sequence of separate scandals had eroded confidence in her leadership. At a House Oversight hearing days after the Leonnig story, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland told Pierson it was extremely disturbing that Secret Service agents felt more comfortable telling members of Congress what they had seen than telling their own director. Pierson resigned on October 1, 2014. Surveillance cameras were upgraded. Personnel were reshuffled. The bullet impacts on the Truman Balcony and the residence facade were repaired, but historic preservation rules dictated that the original glass elsewhere could not simply be replaced. The marks of November 11, 2011, are still there if you know where to look.
The White House stands at 38.90 degrees N, 77.04 degrees W on the north side of the Ellipse in central Washington, D.C. The Truman Balcony faces south toward the South Lawn and Constitution Avenue. The entire area is inside Prohibited Area P-56A - all aircraft are barred without specific FAA approval. Reagan National (KDCA) is four miles south. Andrews JBA (KADW) is seven miles east-southeast. The Washington Special Flight Rules Area extends 30 nautical miles from DCA. Aerial approach is impossible by design.