The former Navy SEAL who claims to have fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 was arrested in DFW on Wednesday.
Robert J. O’Neill was arrested in Frisco and is charged with misdemeanor public intoxication and assault after coming to the area to appear on a podcast at a cigar lounge, according to Daily Mail.
Details from the arrest have not been released, but records indicate that O’Neill was arrested and booked in Collin County jail. He was released later on the same day with a $3,500 bond, as reported by KSAT 12.
Last week’s incident was not the first time O’Neill has dealt with law enforcement, as he was arrested in 2016 for allegedly being under the influence while operating a vehicle.
O’Neill was found asleep in the driver’s seat of his running car but claimed to have been using “a prescribed sleep aid to help with long-standing severe insomnia,” according to Fox News.
Prosecutors later dropped charges from the incident after determining that the medication was at fault, but O’Neill entered a treatment plan with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The 47-year-old former Navy SEAL claimed in 2014 to be the member of SEAL Team Six to have fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
During a 2014 interview with the Associated Press, O’Neill described the event and said bin Laden was just “a few feet in front of me.”
“I shot him three times in the head, and I killed him,” said O’Neill, according to the AP.
Although the U.S. government has not verified these claims, O’Neill provided more details in his 2017 memoir The Operator, per Fox News.
O’Neill’s public statement about the event has drawn criticism from other Navy SEALs, as covert operations are often kept under a code of silence within the community.
“We work in secret, and we pride ourselves on that, so if somebody comes out and spills this much, it angers the rest of us,” said Jonathan Gilliam, a former Navy SEAL, per AP News.
Matt Bissonnette, another former Navy SEAL, authored a book of his own and said O’Neill’s claims were false and that another SEAL had been the one to fire the shots that killed bin Laden, according to Fox News.
In nearby Dallas, crime continues to be a problem. There have been 17,335 assault crimes as of August 27, according to the City’s Open Data crime analytics dashboard.
The high crime in Dallas may be associated with a shortage of police officers. A City report indicated that there should be three police officers for every 1,000 residents in Dallas, meaning there should be roughly 4,000 officers to manage crime. Despite these numbers, there are currently only about 3,100 officers of staff.
The lack of officers is felt most in Downtown Dallas, which has significantly higher crime rates than in downtown Fort Worth, which has a special unit dedicated to managing crime in the area.
