No Trespassing

An interloper is shot

The man walking along the sidewalk next to the 8-foot-high fence that separates the South Lawn from tourists and placard wavers seemed suspicious. When the Secret Service officers approached him, he allegedly reached into his coat and turned on them with a loaded 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun. One agent quickly drew his service revolver and fired, wounding the would-be gunman in the right arm.

The interloper, David A. Mahonski, 25, an unemployed electrician from Williamsport, Pa., was no stranger to White House guards, who had observed him on the grounds and questioned him earlier that week. In court, Mahonski burst out that he had “been down to the White House to ask the President to order the FBI to take that bug out of my ear.” U.S. intelligence agencies, he rambled on, had planted a “bug in my ear that transmits everything I think across the country.” The President, Mahonski concluded, “had certain elements of this society fill me full of dangerous drugs . . . that take my judgment like the Communists would, and ruined my life.” Mahonski was charged with assault on a federal officer and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital for a 30-day psychiatric evaluation.