Qualla: 2011 White House shooting

2011 White House shooting: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

2011 White House shooting: Mistaken for a Gang Dispute

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 an...

2011 White House shooting: The Idaho Falls Drift

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

2011 White House shooting: Sheer Luck

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 nor...

2011 White House shooting: Why a Director Resigned

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, tha...