Ryan returned home in the early afternoon and went inside through the back as he was locked out of his side door, telling reporters who stood watching on the sidewalk he must have forgotten his keys. That would be the last time anyone saw the congressman in Janesville, because sometime after 3 p.m., he exited his home into the back yard (where reporters couldn’t see) and went into the woods.
“I grew up in those woods. The house I grew up in backs up to the house I live in, so I know those woods like the back of my hand. So it wasn’t too hard to walk through them. So I just went out my back door, went through the gully in the woods I grew up playing in. I walked past the tree that has my own tree fort I built back there,” Ryan said.
Escaping via the woods isn’t something new for Ryan, either. It is a tactic the congressman has been forced to use before due to protesters in front of his house. Ryan is used to cutting through the bushes.
Waiting a couple of hundred yards on the other side: Speth, who took Ryan and his family to an airport in neighboring Illinois, where a private plane would whisk them to Virginia.
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