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Secret Service stumbled after 2011 White House shooting

WASHINGTON — The gunman parked his black Honda directly south of the White House, in the dark of a November night, in a closed lane of Constitution Avenue. He pointed his long, semiautomatic rifle out of the passenger window, aimed directly at the home of the president of the United States, and pulled the trigger.

A bullet smashed a window on the second floor, just steps from the first family’s formal living room. Another lodged in a window frame, and more pinged off the roof, sending bits of wood and concrete to the ground.

At least seven bullets struck the upstairs residence of the White House, flying some 700 yards across the South Lawn.

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But because of a string of security lapses, it was not until four days later that the Secret Service realized that a man had fired a high-powered rifle at the White House.

President Obama and his wife were out of town on that evening of Nov. 11, 2011, but their younger daughter, Sasha, and Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, were inside, while older daughter Malia was expected back any moment from an outing with friends.

Secret Service officers initially rushed to respond. One, stationed directly under the second-floor terrace where the bullets struck, drew her .357 handgun and prepared to crack open an emergency gun box.

Snipers on the roof, standing just 20 feet from where one bullet struck, scanned the South Lawn through their rifle scopes for signs of an attack. With little camera surveillance on the White House perimeter, it was up to the Secret Service officers on duty to figure out what was going on.

Then came an order that surprised some of the officers. ‘‘No shots have been fired. . . . Stand down,’’ a supervisor called over his radio. He said the noise was the backfire from a nearby construction vehicle.

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That command was the first of several security lapses, never previously reported, as the Secret Service failed to identify and properly investigate a serious attack on the White House.

While the shooting and eventual arrest of the gunman, Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez, received attention at the time, neither the bungled internal response nor the potential danger to the Obama daughters has been publicly known.

By the end of that Friday night, the agency had confirmed that a shooting had occurred but wrongly insisted the gunfire was never aimed at the White House.