South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach was closed for more than three hours on the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, between Via Agape and 1236 S. Ocean Blvd. — from around 6 p.m. until roughly 9:30 p.m., according to town alerts cited by CBS12 News. The road runs past President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, and what shut it down began, police said, at a closed Secret Service screening checkpoint in the Bath & Tennis Club's west parking lot.
According to a probable cause affidavit described by CBS12, a 29-year-old Loxahatchee woman, identified by police as Alexa Rae Scharf, drove a gray Hyundai SUV into the checkpoint around 6:05 p.m., parked beside the vehicle-screening tents, got out and turned on a hose. A Secret Service agent asked who she was, the affidavit says, and she replied, "I'm here for the car wash." Police say she then drove toward the agent as he tried to photograph her license plate, forcing him aside, and that minutes later officers found a nearby estate's entrance gate knocked down. Investigators allege she drove at a Palm Beach police captain and a second officer in the driveway before fleeing south with cruisers behind her.
Inside the SUV, unmentioned in the affidavit entirely, was a dog.
The pursuit ended in a driveway in the 1500 block of South Ocean Boulevard. Police conducted a felony stop, repeatedly ordered the driver out, laid stop sticks beneath the tires and broke the rear windshield and rear driver-side window, CBS12 reported. Officers then opened the driver's door and pulled her out.
CBS12 reported that the affidavit does not describe what happened with the dog, and that the Palm Beach Police Department provided that account separately to the station. The department said a pit bull inside the SUV jumped over the driver, charged at officers and bit one of them when the door was opened. An officer shot the dog twice. Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control and a veterinarian tried to treat it; it died. The department did not report the dog's name or age. The condition of the bitten officer has not been released. The Secret Service declined to comment.
Only one news organisation — CBS12 News (WPEC) — has been found reporting this shooting. No independent account of what happened when that door opened was located, and the department's own charging document is silent on it. Every contested detail above rests on the account police gave one newsroom.
Police said an initial on-scene investigation found no policy violations. The officer who fired has not been placed on administrative leave, CBS12 reported. There is no indication of any further review. The driver faces two counts of aggravated assault with a vehicle, felony fleeing and resisting an officer without violence, police said, with the affidavit also citing probable cause for three counts of resisting with violence; the dog's death appears in no charging document at all. No federal agency requires police departments to report the dogs their officers kill, which is why a shooting cleared on scene in a matter of hours leaves behind exactly one record: what the department chose to say about it.