Terrifying details of CDC shooting reveal tragedy could have been much worse as agency slams 'misinformation'
Patrick Joseph White, 30, was carrying five guns, including at least one long gun, when he was denied entry and forced to drive across the street to a CVS, where he began his shooting rampage.
He wrecked havoc outside the CDC headquarters, striking at least four buildings of the facility's campus and leaving workers and nearby Emory University students terrified for their lives.
While responding to the scene as bullets rang and shattered windows, DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose, 33, was shot and killed by the culprit.
White was later confirmed dead amid the gunfire. No civilians were injured by his rampage, although workers and 92 children at the campus daycare were locked down until the late night.
A union representing CDC workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) said the incident was not random and 'compounds months of mistreatment, neglect, and vilification that CDC staff have endured.'
It demanded federal officials condemn vaccine misinformation, saying it was putting scientists at risk.
This statement comes after it was revealed the shooter was an anti-vaxxer who blamed a recent illness on the COVID-19 vaccine, which was promoted by the CDC.
He claimed the vaccine made him feel suicidal and depressed, the Associated Press reported.
White's father sounded the alarm to police that his son was the possible shooter.
He said White was upset over the death of his dog and had become fixated on the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the law enforcement official.
White's neighbor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the shooter told her on several occasions that he distrusted the vaccines.
'He was very unsettled, and he very deeply believed that vaccines hurt him and were hurting other people,' Nancy Hoalst, told the Atlanta outlet. 'He emphatically believed that.'
But Hoalst said she never believed White would be violent.
White was found on the second floor of a building across the street from the CDC campus and died at the scene, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said.
He added that is was unclear if White turned the gun on himself or if an officer had shot him.
But due to the complexity of the crime scene, the investigation is expected to take an 'extended period of time,' according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations.
Meanwhile, the AFGE has asserted the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must provide a 'clear and unequivocal stance in condemning vaccine disinformation.'
Fired But Fighting, a group of laid-off CDC employees, has said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC´s workforce.
They claimed he has lied about vaccine safety and fueled a 'climate of hostility and mistrust.'
Kennedy reached out to staff on Saturday, saying 'no one should face violence while working to protect the health of others.'
The union has argued that until all the windows are repaired and the site is totally secured, staffers should not be mandated to immediately return for work.
It also called for 'perimeter security on all campuses until the investigation is over and reviewed by the CDC.
Rose, who lost his life during the gut-wrenching attack, had just joined the police force in September.
The CVS was also shot at, as the shooter started firing from there after guards denied him entry to the headquarters
He leaves behind a pregnant wife and two children.
'This evening, there is a wife without a husband. There are three children, one unborn, without a father,' DeKalb County CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson said during a press conference.
'There is a mother and a father, as well as siblings who also share in this traumatic loss. Let's join together to give this family the support it needs.'
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation's founding motto in 1935 was 'Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity', but by the late Seventies the third of those tenets was thought to be distinctly lacking in the court of US public opinion. Forty-eight years under its controversial founding director J Edgar Hoover had taken their toll. His patriotic instincts may not have been in doubt, but his methods and principal targets most certainly had been. In 1978 the Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, proposed to do something about restoring the tarnished reputation of an agency that had overstepped in countering perceived Marxist subversion in the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam, while paying too little attention to corruption in high office and white collar and organised crime. Carter turned to Judge William H Webster, a moderate Republican and teetotal Christian Scientist who was polite, affable, hugely patriotic and ready to persevere in what he called the 'gruelling and thankless' task of restoring probity. Only the third man to head the FBI in a permanent capacity, Webster was already a long-serving federal judge noted for his scrupulous fairness and attention to legal propriety. Insisting on being addressed as 'Judge', he earned the respect of FBI agents, despite his formal manner and frequent bouts of bad temper. Engendering fear with what one colleague called his 'steely blue eyes', Webster took on what he called the 'Hoover hard hats' and imposed his will on those parts of the organisation that had long gone rogue. He was praised for ordering a sting aimed at exposing corrupt congressman in what became known as the Abscam case, where agents posed as representatives of a bogus Arab company offering bribes for political favours. A senator and six congressmen were snared and convicted in 1981. 'There were times when the undercover operation was the only way,' Webster told an FBI oral history project. A man who saw ethics in black and white, strictly framed by law, he tried and failed to impose a written legal charter defining the limits of what the FBI could do. However, tighter budgetary constraints were imposed along with greater accountability to Congress on how money was spent. From 1980, he dedicated far greater resources to dealing with the threat of terrorism. 'We were not having Oklahoma bombings and [World] Trade Centers, but we were having an average of 100 terrorist incidents a year in the US, all of which were life-threatening, so I asked that that be made a top priority,' he said. He identified a lack of diversity as a contributing factor to some of the bureau's failures. As such, he was proud of having increased the number of female operatives from 90 to some 800 during his nine years in the post. 'We doubled the number of African-Americans. We did about the same thing with Hispanics.' The end of his tenure at the FBI laid the foundations for his second great act of public service, as director of the CIA from 1987 to 1991. An operation had gathered evidence that the CIA had been involved in an unconstitutional scheme to sell arms to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with the added advantage of creating leverage to free American hostages in Lebanon. Proceeds from the arms sales would then be used to finance the anti-communist Contra rebels against the Marxist regime in Nicaragua, in defiance of a congressional ban. It was clear from the investigation that national security advisers were implicated in the biggest White House scandal since Watergate. It broke in November 1986. Months later, President Reagan appointed Webster director of the CIA with a brief to restore public confidence — a 'safe pair of hands' who could placate Congress after the departure of that zealot for political intrigue and clandestine operations, William Casey. Webster approached the task with prudence. John Bellinger, his assistant at the CIA, recalled: 'Judge Webster would always ask, 'What's chapter two?' He thought ahead of what the consequences of an initial decision would be.' Although he was allowed to attend more social functions at the White House than his predecessor because, in the estimation of Nancy Reagan, his table manners were a marked improvement on Casey's, it did not betoken admittance to Reagan's inner circle. Refusing to toady up to 'big hitters' around the president, Webster insisted on total transparency in all his dealings in the White House. 'If the White House invited me to come over to talk about something and hadn't called the department first, I would always call the attorney-general and say, 'I was invited to go over, would you or somebody like to go over with me?' I wanted the protection of working through the department.' He respected Reagan as 'a very polite person who wasn't out to get people but was out to get the job done right'. Though he often played tennis with Webster, Reagan's successor George HW Bush was less inclined to defer to him and often acted on his own initiative to gather intelligence reports, especially as some in the White House, including Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz (obituary, February 8, 2021), had been critical of the quality of his briefings. When Bush became president in January 1989, Webster found himself gradually superseded by Casey's former deputy, Robert Gates, who was appointed deputy national security adviser. Gates was suspected of undermining Webster, while Bush's chief of staff John Sununu and the secretary of state James Baker were also suspected of briefing against him. His relationship with Bush was fatally wounded after Webster disagreed with the president's plan to invade Panama in December 1989 to topple the corrupt dictator General Noriega. Several months later, Webster presented Bush with powerful evidence of Saddam Hussein's plans for an imminent invasion of Kuwait a week before this actually occurred on August 2, 1990. Bush chose instead to trust his personal contacts in the Middle East and discounted the evidence. Some argued that it was Webster's much-vaunted independence from the foreign policy-making process that undermined his credibility at this crucial juncture. The CIA was then deemed to have failed in its evaluation of Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons capability and in particular its undercounting (by 300) of the Scud missiles that Iraq had at its disposal. The agency was given a roasting by General Norman Schwarzkopf for the unreliability of its satellite-imaging technology in assessing bomb damage. Throughout the Gulf War, Webster had met Bush daily to brief him, but he was not one of the 'Gang of Eight' who effectively ran the show. In May 1991 Webster dropped hints that he might be prepared to retire, though more in the hope that Bush would rush to dissuade him than otherwise. However, Bush readily acquiesced and nominated Gates to replace him. Webster had inherited a demoralised organisation, uneasy about the legality of its clandestine operations and uncertain about its role. It needed someone with his genuine respect for Congress to guide the agency through the thicket of external criticism while maintaining its effectiveness. Although there were some intelligence blunders over China and eastern Europe, there were solid achievements as well; the CIA correctly identified nuclear and chemical weapons proliferation as the most significant trend; it predicted the economic travails of the Soviet Union and the likelihood of an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev as well as the civil war in Yugoslavia; and it developed a policy of economic intelligence-gathering towards foreign trade competitors. Webster may have been politically naive and inept at wooing the press, but he kept the CIA on a straight course. Through it all, he stuck to his guiding principle: 'Order protects liberty and liberty protects order.' William Hedgcock Webster was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1924 to Thomas Webster, a farmer and small businessman, and Katherine (née Hedgcock). His was a traditional Christian upbringing, steeped in 'God, family, and service'. He attended Amherst College, Massachusetts, but interrupted his studies there to serve in the US Naval Reserve from 1943 to 1946, attaining the rank of lieutenant. He went on to study law at Washington University Law School in St Louis, graduating in 1949 and joining a law firm in the city. However, he was recalled to the navy in the Korean War, during which he was assigned a member of the legal staff to defend a seaman who had been accused of theft. He urged his client to remain silent, as the man had not been advised of his right to legal representation prior to his interrogation. Although the ploy antagonised his senior officers, Webster was congratulated by fleet headquarters and his procedure was incorporated into the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Returning to private practice at the same St Louis law firm, he was elevated to partner after four years and appointed US attorney for the eastern district of Missouri by President Eisenhower in 1960. Resigning from this post after the inauguration of President Kennedy, Webster went back into private practice. In 1971 President Nixon appointed him judge of the United States district court for eastern Missouri at a salary less than half what he had been receiving from his law partnership. None of the 44 decisions that he handed down was reversed by a court of appeals and in 1973 he was appointed to the federal Court of Appeals for the eighth circuit. His record as an appeal court justice was characterised by judicial restraint. He rarely refuted the decisions of juries or lower courts and only overturned 16 of the more than 600 appeals he heard. In criminal cases he turned down suits brought by members of the militant American Indian Movement who had occupied Wounded Knee, but ruled in favour of a black woman seeking to bring a class action suit against the Pillsbury Company on grounds of race and sex discrimination. Notably, Webster joined a ruling that the University of Minnesota could not deny recognition to a campus organisation supporting gay rights. He also supported a suit by women on the Fargo, North Dakota, police force who were paid 50 per cent less than men with comparable duties. In 1975 he was one of six finalists considered for promotion to the US Supreme Court bench. Webster was first married to Drusilla Lane in 1953. She died of cancer in 1984. In 1990 he married Lynda Jo Clugston, a 34-year-old hotel sales executive, who had some years earlier applied to join the CIA and been turned down for health reasons. Their courtship was not easy. Whenever Clugston entered his bedroom, security alarms would go off. She survives him along with three children from his first marriage: Drusilla, Katherine and William Jr. After leaving the CIA, Webster returned to private practice as a senior partner at Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCLoy. Having been driven everywhere for decades, he was obliged to buy a map of downtown Washington simply to find his way around. He would still be called upon to sit on various legal bodies and conduct investigations into wrongdoing at the FBI. In 2018 Webster and other former CIA directors co-signed a letter condemning President Trump for revoking the security clearances of a former CIA colleague who had criticised the president's flouting of legal procedure. A year later, the 95-year-old Webster was the victim of attempted online fraud. The scammer picked the wrong man, whose perspicacity endured. Keniel Thomas was given a six-year sentence in 2019. William Webster, US federal judge and director of the FBI and the CIA, was born on March 6, 1924. He died on August 8, 2025, aged 101
