Secret Service Raid, November 28, 2002, Denton Murphy
From MemoryArchive
Who: Denton Murphy What: Secret Service Raid When: November 28, 2002 Where: Thurston Hall, George Washington University
One of the most surreal events of my life took place during my freshman year of college, when I attended George Washington University. Coming from the suburbs south of Houston, I was enjoying my first year in DC. One of the things that I enjoyed most about going to GW was its centrality in the middle of the nation’s capital. The White House, the Capitol, the very nerve center of American government, all resided mere blocks from where I lived. Thrown into this mix were the usual college experiences. Chief among them was living with three other very quirky roommates. Although I had shared a room with my brother back home, being thrown into an alien environment with three perfect strangers is a totally different phenomenon altogether.
After coming back to school the Sunday following Thanksgiving, I had noticed that one of my roommates, who I will call Rob, had begun acting a little more strangely than usual. For starters, he told the rest of us that he had not slept the past two days. While I could understand doing that when cramming for a test or finishing a paper, I did not have a clue as to why anybody would willingly put themselves through that during a vacation. Then right around 5 am, the time we usually went to bed in my room, (hey, it was freshman year!) Rob, who still had not slept, went into a frenzied burst of activity, and started to pester my roommates and me about going in with him on scheme to get free airline tickets for life. The three crucial elements to Rob’s plan were in his words “ Wall Street, American Airlines, and Condolezza Rice.” He wanted us to take a train up to New York with him that very minute so we could go to Wall Street and complete step one in this exotic quest. We all thought that he was joking with us, which he had done in the past in the same manner, but he just would not drop the subject. Needless to say, we were tired and wanted to sleep instead, so we told Rob to can it and go out in the hall, which he finally did. As I fell asleep, I could hear Rob pacing up and down the hall talking to himself about his fantastic plan.
I had to wake up relatively early, at 9:00, and when I woke up, I found that Rob had vanished. Thinking that he had merely went out to get breakfast with some friends, I went about my day, going to classes and running a few errands that I needed to take care of. I wound everything up by 6:00 and came back to my room to relax a bit before a Russian language class I had at 8. Rob had still not returned, but I was not too concerned about it. Taking a beer left over from the weekend out of the refrigerator, I settled down into a chair and turned on the TV to watch Sportscenter, hoping to catch NFL highlights I had missed the day before.
Not more than 15 minutes had passed when I heard a loud knock on my door, with a voice saying “Secret Service, open up.” At first, I thought it was one of my friends having a little fun, as we occasionally would play pranks like this on one another. Feeling lazy, I decided that I wouldn’t answer the door and mess with them a bit. The knock then became more forceful, the voice a little louder. I still didn’t answer. The third time, the voice, noticeably harsher, said “Secret Service, if you do not open up, we will have to force our way in.” A little annoyed, I got up and said “Damn, alright already!” and cracked the door open, so as to conceal the beer, technically illegal in the dorms.
What I saw waiting for me on the other side of the door nearly made me drop the beer all over the floor. Two guys in black trenchcoats, shiny Secret Service badges hanging around their necks, were waiting for me on the other side. The man I took to be the leader of the two was short and stocky, a clean shaven chrome dome adding the final touch to the bulldog like demeanor that he seemed to exude from his pores. His partner was tall and slender, with short spiky gelled hair. At first glance he did not seem the type of person you thought of as being in the Secret Service, but the cold look of contempt he gave me combined with his hand tensed on his exposed shoulder holster helped dispel any illusions to the contrary. In addition, the two agents were accompanied by two hulking GWU security guards, because I guess opening a door on two Secret Servicemen, one of whom was ready to draw his gun on me, just wasn’t intimidating enough. My initial reaction was to hastily toss my beer into the trash beside the door. My mind was so scrambled that the only thing I could think of was that I had fallen prey to some kind of sinister federal crackdown on underage drinking.
The short agent told me in a curt manner “We need to search your room.” He then opened the door and he and his partner brushed past my still shocked form. I imagine at this time I had the textbook deer in the headlights look plastered on my face. The short one then asked if I was Rob’s roommate. He had to repeat the question before I snapped to and was able to answer him. He then asked me where Rob slept and worked at in the room. After pointing both things out, he and his partner “tossed” Rob’s belongings, dumping out his desk drawers, flipping his mattress, the whole nine yards. During this time, the short man continued to ask questions. “Had Rob made any threats against the life of the president?” “Had Rob ever made any noticeably threatening remarks against the American government in general?” “Did Rob speak Arabic?” “Had he traveled to the Middle East lately?” As I answered him, my mind raced from one scenario to another. I imagined TV cameras lined up outside the building, wanting to get a glance at the crazed assassin/terrorist’s roommate. Or better yet, giving an interview to some reporter along the lines of the same old bullshit you see people say when they find out their neighbor is a serial killer/child molester type freak of nature. They would ask me the ubiquitous “Did you see it coming?” type question and of course I would respond “No, never, Rob was just a normal guy right up until he decided it would be good idea to kill the president/blow himself up/etc.”
I mean, I had lived with the guy for 3 months, and now I was being questioned like he was part of al Qaeda all along. Common sense then came crashing back into my head like a thunderclap. Suddenly in the midst of this questioning, I blurted out to the agents “For Chistsakes, Rob’s Jewish, and you’re telling me he’s working for al Qaeda? What the hell is going on?” At this point the slender guy spoke up, and simply told me “All you need to know is that Rob tried to see someone he shouldn’t have.” With that, they soundlessly vanished out of my room and down the hall, like they were never there in the first place. I simply stood in my room a couple of minutes, absorbing what in the hell had just happened to me.
From what I could piece together later, my roommate had tried to jump the White House fence, hoping to reach Condolezza Rice. The reason lay in that he was manic-depressive, an illness that doesn’t usually show signs until around late adolescence. His burst of inspiration involving free airline tickets had been part of his first manic episode that he was experiencing. The ease with which the Secret Service had crashed into my life was the first event that really brought the magnitude of September 11th into my life. Now my roommate was not just a lone ranger off on a manic jag of a plan, as it probably would have been treated pre 9/11. In the post 9/11 eyes of the Secret Service, he had morphed into Osama bin Ladin’s vicious little lackey, an insidious agent living mere blocks from the White House. I guess this line of reasoning was why I, an average college freshman, very nearly wound up looking at the business end of a Secret Serviceman’s pistol.
