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Man detained outside White House for trying to fly drone

Posted at 2:05 PM, May 14, 2015
and last updated 2015-05-14 14:05:09-04

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Secret Service detained a man Thursday afternoon who eyewitnesses tell CNN was trying to fly some sort of remote-controlled aerial device over the White House fence. The park on the north side of the White House has been placed on lockdown while the incident is being investigated.

President Barack Obama is not currently in the White House and is at Camp David. Additional details of the incident were not immediately available Thursday afternoon.

It’s the second drone incident at the White House this year, coming four months after another man — a U.S. intelligence agency employee who had admittedly been drinking alcohol earlier in the night — lost control of a borrowed personal quadcopter drone that he’d been flying around his apartment, intending to send it out his window and then bring it back inside.

The drone crash-landed on the White House lawn around 3 a.m. The man reported that he had been flying the drone to the Secret Service only after learning where it had crashed from news reports, and he did not face criminal charges.