The young man who drove through a gate at Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun before being shot dead by Secret Service agents came from a family of avid Trump supporters, rarely talked politics, and was afraid of guns, his cousin said Monday.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had a different description for Austin Tucker Martin, 21, the North Carolina groundskeeper who was killed early Sunday after raising a firearm at law enforcement.
Leavitt called him “a crazy person.”
The characterization delivered by Leavitt, who has often made misleading or false statements on topics ranging from government spending to media coverage to basic geography, according to independent fact-checkers, happened to be correct.
Martin, authorities said, drove from his home in Cameron, North Carolina, to Palm Beach, Florida, purchased a shotgun along the way, and walked through a gate at the president’s private club before pointing the weapon at officers. He was carrying a fuel canister.
But if Martin was crazy, his cousin suggested, so too might be the political movement that produced him.
“We are big Trump supporters, all of us. Everybody,” Braeden Fields, 19, told the Associated Press.
Fields described Martin as his cousin and said he was quiet, generous with his paychecks from the local golf course, and so averse to firearms that he would never join family hunting trips. “He wouldn’t even hurt an ant,” Fields said. “He doesn’t even know how to use a gun.”
Martin had been missing for about 12 hours before his family reported him gone. They had no idea he was driving to Mar-a-Lago.
What they also may not have known, according to messages obtained by TMZ, was that their quiet, nonpolitical relative had become fixated on the Jeffrey Epstein files.
On Feb. 15, just over a week before his death, Martin texted a co-worker about the documents the Justice Department had begun releasing under a law President Trump signed in November.
“I don’t know if you read up on the Epstein Files, but evil is real and unmistakable,” Martin wrote. “The best people like you and I can do is use what little influence we have. Tell other people about what you hear about the Epstein files and what the government is doing about it. Raise awareness.”
He was raising awareness at Mar-a-Lago shortly before 1:30 a.m. Sunday, when he encountered two Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy.
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said Martin set the fuel can down but raised the shotgun to a “shooting position.” The officers fired.
Martin, whose co-workers said was frustrated about the economy and had tried unsuccessfully to start a union at his job, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Trump was in Washington at the time.
The files that consumed Martin in his final days contain material that might trouble any Trump supporter. Emails released by the House Oversight Committee show Epstein mentioned Trump more than 1,000 times in his correspondence — more than any other public figure.
In one 2018 exchange, after the Miami Herald published its investigation reviving scrutiny of Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, an unidentified writer assured Epstein it would “all blow over” because authorities were “really just trying to take down Trump.”
Epstein replied: “yes. thx. it’s wild. because i am the one able to take him down.”
Two months later, Epstein wrote to author Michael Wolff that Trump knew about “the girls” and had asked Ghislaine Maxwell to stop whatever she was doing at Mar-a-Lago.
More detailed allegations exist in files the Justice Department has released — and in some that it hasn’t. Records indicate the FBI interviewed a woman four times in 2019 who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13 or 14, an incident she said involved biting the president and being struck in response.
Those interview records appear to have been removed from public view, despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act requiring disclosure of all documents related to the dead sex offender.
The Justice Department’s press release announcing the file dump included a disclaimer: “This production may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents, or videos, as everything that was sent to the FBI by the public was included.”
Some claims against Trump, the department said, were “unfounded and false” and would have been “weaponized” already if credible.
Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna disagreed, saying the department had withheld 3 million pages in violation of the transparency law.
“The core issue is that they’re not complying with my law, because these were scrubbed back in March by Donald Trump’s FBI,” he said.
Martin apparently found something in the released files that disturbed him. His cousin said he never talked about politics. But his final text message suggests he was thinking about them.
Leavitt’s office did not respond to questions about whether the press secretary stood by her characterization of the slain man. Her description — “a crazy person” — may have been accurate as a factual matter. But coming from an administration whose press shop has repeatedly defended a president named in more than a thousand Epstein emails, it struck some observers as a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Martin’s family, meanwhile, was left to reconcile the son they knew — the sketch artist who drew golf courses and prayed over his work — with the man who died pointing a shotgun at Secret Service agents.
“He’s a good kid,” his cousin said. “I wouldn’t believe he would do something like this.”
The investigation continues but many of the Epstein files remain redacted, under seal and hidden.