An FBI official is calling on the public to send tips about the driver to the bureau.
A driver rammed a car into an FBI security gate at the Pittsburgh bureau office on Wednesday morning in what the agency said is a “targeted attack” that may be an “act of terror” against the bureau, it said.
In a statement on X, the FBI Pittsburgh office said the individual hit the gate at around 2:40 a.m. local time, exited the vehicle, and then removed an “American flag from the backseat” before throwing the flag on the damaged gate.
The driver of the vehicle then fled the scene, said the FBI statement. No details of the suspect were provided by the office.
“This incident is considered a targeted attack against the FBI,” it said. “No FBI personnel were injured.”
The agency provided a photo of the vehicle used in the incident, which was a white sedan with a Pennsylvania license plate.
Christopher Giordano, the assistant special agent in charge at the FBI office, told reporters that the vehicle had writing on the windows and confirmed the suspect was identified as Donald Henson, of Penn Hills, Pennsylvania.
Henson allegedly was driving “at a high rate of speed and crashed his vehicle into the FBI Pittsburgh entrance gate,” he told reporters.
The suspect “has still yet to be apprehended,” he said, while providing a photo of the man in the news conference. He is wanted in connection to the crime, which is a federal offense that Giordano said is an “act of terror against the FBI.”
“This was a targeted attack on this building. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but we are going to exhaust every ability we have under the federal law to find, apprehend, and prosecute this subject to the fullest extent,” he also said.
There is no indication that Henson is armed, Giordano told reporters, adding that he appears to have a “mental health problem.” The FBI considers him dangerous, adding that he is a former member of the military.
“In scouring our indexes, we did find … that he did visit the field office a couple of weeks ago to make a complaint that didn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Giordano said. “But we ran down everything that he came down with. It didn’t have a federal nexus. We contacted him to let him know there was no federal crime that we were able to charge.”
