Omar J. Gonzalez had served three combat tours in Iraq. He came home with a traumatic brain injury from an IED blast, severe PTSD, and a constellation of physical and psychological injuries that left him walking with a cane and dependent on what neighbors described as very strong medication. His ex-wife, who divorced him in July 2014, told the Washington Post that after returning from Iraq he kept a handgun on his hip at all times and a small arsenal of rifles and shotguns positioned behind doors throughout the house. In February 2013 he called Virginia State Police to report a burglary at his home. When troopers arrived they found him patrolling his own front yard with an assault rifle and a knife, convinced that cameras and listening devices had been planted in his walls. In a separate July 2014 traffic stop, troopers chased him after he drove his vehicle off the road into a highway median. A search of the car turned up a sawed-off shotgun, two rifles, four handguns, ammunition, a tomahawk, and a map of Washington, D.C. with a circle drawn around the White House. He told the troopers he had not stopped because he was having what he called an Iraqi moment - a PTSD flashback triggered by the police lights and sirens. The Virginia incident did not put him on any federal watch list.

At about 7:20 p.m. on Friday, September 19, 2014, Gonzalez parked near the White House and walked up to the iron fence. He scaled it - approximately 7 feet 6 inches high and topped with spikes - and dropped onto the North Lawn. Several officers shouted at him to stop. He kept running. A K-9 unit was held back because too many officers were already in the field of fire. The officers later said they had chosen not to shoot Gonzalez because his hands were empty, his clothing did not appear bulky enough to conceal explosives, and a missed shot might hit civilians beyond the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. He reached the North Portico - the front door of the White House. The door was unlocked. He went through it. Just inside, a single Secret Service Uniformed Division officer tried to stop him. He pushed her aside. The alarm box near the entrance, which would have alerted other officers inside the building, had been disabled at the request of the usher's office because its frequent false alarms had been disruptive to White House staff.

Gonzalez kept running. He ran past the staircase that leads to the second-floor family residence - where the Obama family would have been sleeping if they had not left for Camp David just minutes earlier. He turned right and made it all the way into the East Room, the largest formal room in the White House. There were no guests in it at the time. An off-duty plain-clothes agent who happened to be at the wrong end of the wrong corridor, on his way home for the night, tackled Gonzalez. Other officers piled on. He was arrested. In his pocket was a Spyderco folding knife with a 3.5-inch serrated blade. He told the officers, as they cuffed him, that the atmosphere was collapsing and he needed to tell the President so the President could alert the public. A subsequent search of his vehicle parked nearby turned up 800 rounds of ammunition, two hatchets, and a machete. He was taken to George Washington University Hospital after complaining of chest pains.

The Secret Service initially told reporters that Gonzalez had been stopped at the North Portico door. It took nine days, until a Washington Post story by Carol Leonnig on September 29, for the public to learn that he had actually made it deep into the East Room. Senior agency leaders had told members of Congress the same false story. Director Julia Pierson, testifying at a House Oversight hearing on September 30, acknowledged that the breach was unacceptable and would never be allowed to happen again. The next day she resigned. The Gonzalez intrusion was the second time in a month that a serious White House security failure had become public - the 2011 shooting that the Secret Service had failed to detect for four days had been broken by Leonnig only days earlier. The fence was eventually replaced with a taller, anti-climb version with sharper spikes. New surveillance was installed. The alarm system inside the residence was overhauled. Ron Fournier of the National Journal observed at the time that almost no commentary focused on the man behind the breach - a wounded combat veteran whom the Department of Veterans Affairs had failed to treat. In March 2015 Gonzalez pled guilty to entering a restricted building while carrying a deadly weapon and to assaulting a federal officer. He was sentenced to 17 months in prison and was released in 2016. He still does not believe the atmosphere is intact.