Oct. 13 (UPI) — A man with a pair of loaded guns and fake passports was arrested near former President Donald Trump’s rally in Coachella, Calif., on Saturday, officials announced. It’s the third time an armed person has been arrested near Trump in recent months.
The suspect, Vem Miller, 49, was carrying a shotgun and handgun, both loaded, police said, when he was stopped at a security checkpoint while driving a black SUV. Deputies located the two firearms and a “high-capacity magazine,” officials said. Miller was taken into custody “without incident,” according to Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who called Miller “a lunatic.” Miller was also said to have a “homemade” license plate on the SUV.
Miller was detained at 5 p.m. PDT Saturday, about an hour before Trump’s rally was scheduled to start, police said. He was booked on possession of a loaded firearm and a high-capacity magazine.
Miller was charged with two misdemeanor weapons charges and released on a $5,000 bail. So far, no federal charges have been filed. Officials said any federal charges, if any, could only be made by a federal agency.
In a news conference Sunday, Bianco said he was not able to release any details about the incident and the investigation “because of what we’re doing,” he said.
A federal law enforcement official told CBS News there was no indication of an assassination attempt connected to the incident.
As the Republican presidential nominee, Trump is locked in a bitter, neck-and-neck rivalry with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and has ramped up his often false and inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail and in media appearances since a debate between the two in early October.
Many analysts said Harris won that debate handily by attacking Trump’s record on inflation and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and by calling out his string of falsehoods on the economy, the size of his campaign rallies and refusing to support a bipartisan compromise that would have increased security along the U.S.-Mexico border, which has become a sensitive campaign issue for both candidates.
Trump has continued to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment, continuing to claim, without evidence, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating residents’ pet dogs and cats. The Springfield Mayor has said those claims are false.
This is the third incident involving firearms near a Trump event. The first was an assassination attempt that came within inches of claiming Trump’s life during a campaign rally in Butler, Pa. In the second, the Secret Service spotted the muzzle of a gun in the bushes while Trump played golf at his country club in Florida. Officials detained that man.
The gunmen in the first two incidents were either registered Republicans or had been supportive of Trump’s hardline positions in the past.
Federal officials said there was no direct evidence that the incident in Coachella was related to a planned assassination attempt but they did not rule it out.
