A Garfield Heights man is facing federal charges after investigators traced a 9mm handgun recovered following a deadly shootout outside the White House back to his 2022 purchase, and then allegedly caught him lying about how he lost track of it. Federal prosecutors say Cylinntheo Yates bought the gun in March 2022, sold it at some point afterward, and then repeatedly gave investigators a false account of how the weapon left his hands after it turned up in the possession of Nasire Best, the 21-year-old Maryland man killed in a gunfight with Secret Service agents outside the White House in May.
According to Cleveland.com, federal prosecutors unsealed the indictment against Yates on Monday in federal court in Cleveland, charging him with three counts of making false statements to federal investigators. The case stems from a shooting that authorities say occurred shortly after 6 p.m. on May 23 near 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., where Uniformed Division Secret Service officers returned fire and killed Best after he pulled a handgun from a messenger bag and emptied his magazine toward a security checkpoint, according to CBS News.
How Investigators Traced the Gun to Ohio
Authorities traced the gun Best possessed back to Yates after the shooting, per the indictment cited in the Cleveland.com report. Garfield Heights police and ATF agents first interviewed Yates on May 23, 2026, the same day as the shooting, and followed up with additional ATF and Secret Service interviews on May 25 and June 3.
During those interviews, Yates told investigators the gun had been stolen roughly six months after he bought it. He said the weapon was inside his car when the vehicle broke down and that he left it at a gas station, and that he never saw the gun again after the car was towed, the indictment states. But Garfield Heights police records showed no report that Yates ever reported the gun stolen, and vehicle towing records showed no record of his car being towed at all, according to the indictment as reported by Cleveland.com. The indictment states that Yates well knew this statement was false, since Garfield Heights police records revealed no such reports.
Yates also told agents he had reported the gun stolen to Garfield Heights police, a claim the indictment says was contradicted by department records. During the final interview on June 3, he denied selling the gun altogether, repeating the false-statement claim across his conversations with ATF and Secret Service agents. A subsequent investigation revealed that Yates had, in fact, sold the firearm, prosecutors said. Court records list no attorney for Yates.
The Case Against Yates Under Federal Law
The three counts against Yates fall under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, the federal statute that criminalizes knowingly and willfully making false statements to federal law enforcement investigators. Each count carries a maximum statutory penalty of up to five years in federal prison, along with potential fines of up to $250,000, according to the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Notably, the indictment does not establish whether the gun was actually used in the May 23 shooting itself, only that authorities traced it from Yates to Best.
The recovery reflects a routine but massive federal apparatus for tracking firearms used in crimes. The ATF's National Tracing Center in West Virginia, which operates the eTrace system to trace crime guns from manufacturer through wholesaler to the first retail purchaser, processed nearly 655,000 trace requests for over 10,500 law enforcement agencies in fiscal year 2025, the agency has reported.
Who Was Nasire Best
Best was a 21-year-old resident of Glenarden and Dundalk, Maryland, who graduated from Dundalk High School in 2023, where he ran track, according to The Los Angeles Times. In the months before the shooting, he experienced social isolation and severe mental illness, the paper reported. Best also had a documented history of mental health encounters and Secret Service arrests at the White House complex before the fatal confrontation, including an involuntary psychiatric commitment on June 26, 2025, after he blocked a vehicle entry lane while claiming to be Jesus Christ, and a July 10, 2025 arrest for unlawful entry onto restricted grounds, per CBS News.
The shootout was one of several security scares near federal leaders in Washington that spring. Less than a month earlier, on April 25, 2026, federal authorities arrested 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen outside the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents' Dinner after he allegedly ran past screening armed with a shotgun and handgun, according to Wikipedia. White House communications officials that month publicly pointed to a heightened threat environment surrounding federal property, citing multiple recent violent security incidents in the capital, as Hoodline previously reported.
A Bystander's $25 Million Claim Against the Secret Service
The shootout also left a bystander badly wounded. Benjamin Del Real Jr., a 25-year-old active-duty U.S. Army soldier, was visiting the White House area from North Carolina when he was struck by a bullet that his attorneys say was fired by Secret Service agents. In July, Del Real filed a $25 million administrative claim against the Secret Service, alleging that agents acted negligently when returning fire and struck him in the abdomen while he was in Washington with his family, according to Army Times.
Del Real's legal representatives have said that surveillance footage and Best's physical position, facing away from Del Real during the shootout, indicated that Secret Service gunfire, rather than Best's weapon, caused the abdominal injury. That claim remains one of several unresolved questions hanging over the case, alongside whether Yates's handgun was ever fired during the May 23 confrontation at all — a point the indictment against him does not address.
The Yates case echoes a separate federal prosecution out of Northern Ohio, where a 36-year-old Garfield Heights man was sentenced in May to 29 years in prison after falsely reporting his getaway vehicle stolen following an armed robbery spree, as Hoodline reported at the time. Both cases show how aggressively federal prosecutors in the region have pursued false-statement charges tied to firearms and stolen-property claims.
