A former security staffer for the Biden administration has pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the death of a young woman earlier this week in San Francisco which may have resulted from the careless handling of a firearm.
Nation Wood, 25, offered the plea at his arraignment Friday, where he has been charged with shooting his girlfriend Samantha Emge, 22, at a home Tuesday evening in the city’s Sunset District.
Wood worked as advance security, providing “external advisory site security assessments for events with VIP attendance” for the former President, starting in November of 2023, the New York Post reported, citing his LinkedIn profile which has since been removed.
That job included working with Biden’s Secret Service team, according to the profile.
Posted to his page was also a photo of him standing in front of a jet with a group of other staffers with Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Douglas Emhoff, according to the tabloid.
Police responded to reports of a shooting Tuesday evening and arrived to find Emge suffering from a gunshot wound, according to news outlets. She was rushed to a local hospital and died there.
A preliminary investigation of the shooting, Fox 2 reported, showed the gun may not have been fired intentionally.
Doug Welch with the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, which is representing Wood, told the outlet, “It does seem like a horrific accident.”
Welch requested at the arraignment that his client be released as he has no criminal record, he yelled for help after the incident, and he stayed at the scene of the shooting.
“From the moment this happened, Mr. Wood never moved anywhere away from doing anything other than trying to get Emge help,” Welch argued. “When the police arrived, from the beginning until the end, he was 100 percent cooperative and open with them. Not an iota of movement or word to indicate anything else.”
The Court, however, set Wood’s bail at $300,000.
Wood was scheduled to leave San Francisco to serve in the National Guard. Superior Court Judge Christopher Hu considered him “a flight risk.”
Emge graduated from San Francisco State University and worked in interior design, according to her LinkedIn profile, with Fox2 reporting Emge was Wood’s girlfriend.
Emge’s Instagram account shows the two together in several posts, with one post showing them posing in November front of El Capitan at Yosemite National Park.
The photo with Vice President Harris’s group in front of a presidential jet involving a trip to a summit meeting of international leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Corporation in San Francisco.
Wood posted the photo to his LinkedIn page.
“Very grateful to have had the opportunity to help the VP with her trip to APEC in San Francisco,” Wood’s comment on the photo reads, according to the Post.
A spokesman told the Post Wood was never an employee of the Secret Service.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
