(Ken Silva, Headline USA) On New Year’s Eve, a man shot and killed a 16-year-old in Tamarac, Florida. That man is a Secret Service recruit, the agency reportedly confirmed Friday.
“The United States Secret Service is aware of an open investigation by the Broward County Sheriff’s Office that involves a recently hired special agent trainee, who was awaiting entry into an upcoming training academy,” USSS officials said in a statement on Friday, as reported first by Real Clear Politics reporter Susan Crabtree.
“This is an extremely tragic situation, and we are fully cooperating with the Broward Sheriff’s Office as they lead this investigation. Once completed, the results of the independent review will be presented to the Broward State Attorney’s Office.”
The 16-year-old victim was identified as Orlando Wedderburn. A woman was also grazed. The Secret Service recruit, for his part, is claiming self-defense.
🚨🚨SECRET SERVICE EXCLUSIVE and #Breaking:
Secret Service recruit claims self defense in brother’s New Year’s Eve killing.
Prosecutors are waiting to decide whether to file criminal charges while dectectives investigate the death of the 16-year-old boy.
The shooting comes…
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) January 9, 2026
According to Crabtree, Secret Service Director Sean Curran is receiving internal criticism for not doing enough to eliminate the agency’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies, which were implemented starting in the Obama era.
In her 2021 award-winning history of the Secret Service, “Zero Fail,” Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig detailed how Obama-era DEI policies caused the Secret Service to toss “three hundred files of pending applicants who had all been painstakingly prescreened and were likely hires”—replacing them with applicants who didn’t even know what the agency did.
“Field office supervisors were griping that they were drowning, having to interview hundreds of online applicants in their area who couldn’t possibly pass muster as agents,” she wrote in “Zero Fail.”
“They met one four-hundred-pound man, another with a prosthetic arm. Applicants showed up in gym shorts. Some said they couldn’t agree to a required home interview because their roommates didn’t like having cops around. These interviews sucked up supervisors’ valuable time—with almost no results.”
DEI was implemented in the Secret Service in the early 2010s, and this was the result: the agency threw out 300 qualified applications, replacing them with applicants who didn’t know what the Secret Service did.
Other applicants included a 400 pound man, someone with a prosthetic… pic.twitter.com/zKHi4t8FF7— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) May 13, 2025
According to Leonnig, the Service only hired 18 agents out of a whopping 35,000 applicants at the time.
The Secret Service is now looking to hire 4,000 new employees by 2028.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
