The man Secret Service officers shot and killed Saturday near the White House was a Baltimore County resident who struggled with mental health and had shut out those closest to him in recent months, according to friends and court records.
On Saturday around 6 p.m., Nasire Best pulled a gun from a bag and fired at a White House security checkpoint, police said Sunday. Anthony Guglielmi, the service’s communications director, said in a statement that Secret Service Police returned fire, fatally shooting Best.
An unnamed bystander was injured in the exchange and is in serious condition, authorities said.
Best, 21, attended Dundalk High School and was a part of the track and field team in 2023 before his graduation that year.
A teammate of Best’s said he had “never been an aggressive person.” They described him as “very energetic” and “lighthearted,” someone who “believed he could achieve great things if he put his mind to it.”
The teammate, who asked their name be withheld to protect their privacy, said Best had been employed but appeared to struggle mentally last year and had grown increasingly “irritable,” leading them to cut off contact with him.
Jerome Patterson also ran track with Best and told The Banner the two worked together at Amazon after their graduation. For a while Best seemed normal, with Patterson describing himself as Best’s “closest friend.”
“We both worked alongside each other, sitting and chatting every day. He came to me about everything. And everything was fine until randomly he started talking about being in control of people and reality, and how he could tap into a different frequency and hear and peep things that we couldn’t,” Patterson said.
Eventually, Patterson said, Best became convinced he was God, which led him to quit his job at Amazon.
“He eventually blocked and stopped talking to his closest friends and disappeared,” Patterson said, adding that Best was not on good terms with his family.
The Washington Post interviewed a woman who identified herself as Best’s mother and said she learned of her son’s death on social media.
“I’m still in disbelief right now,” the woman told The Post, adding that her son “was never violent, regardless of what people are posting” online.
Best began having run-ins with Secret Service officers last summer, when he would walk around the White House and stop at various entry points to ask officers how he could get inside, according to court records. In late June, the Secret Service sought to have Best involuntarily committed after he blocked a vehicle trying to enter the White House grounds.
Then, on July 10, Best was arrested after he walked through an exit turnstile and tried to go farther onto White House grounds. Officers in court records said Best told them he was “Jesus Christ” and he “wanted to get arrested.”
A D.C. judge released Best, who pleaded not guilty, apparently on the condition he stay away from the White House. Best didn’t show up for his next court date and had been wanted in Washington since.
President Donald Trump, in a statement posted to his Truth Social platform, suggested Best had a “possible obsession with our Country’s most cherished structure” without citing other evidence.
Court records show Best was living in Dundalk last year before his landlord had him evicted for failure to pay rent. Best did not appear in court for those proceedings and was evicted in December, records show.
Saturday’s shooting was the third time in a month that shots were fired near Trump, including incidents at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in April and around the Washington Monument in early May.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
This article has been updated.
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