Just days after the horrifying assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, recently surfaced video appears to show that police had warning prior to the attack.
Footage circulating online from the event shows several attendees shouting at police and alerting them to a suspicious person climbing on the roof of a nearby business, just moments before shots rang out. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, the warnings from the crowd came 86 seconds before the gunfire erupted.
As we now know, the shooter, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, reportedly used a ladder to access the rooftop of a building nearly 150 yards from where Trump was speaking. From there, Crooks fired multiple rounds toward Trump, injuring the former president and two rally attendees and leaving one man dead.
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Scripps News political correspondent Alex Miller was at the rally Saturday when gunfire erupted. She recounted driving around the grounds that morning and seeing what kind of security was in place.
"The side where the shooter came from was a pretty open area," Miller reported. "You could see the entire stage from the road and there are plenty of people who didn't want to go through the magnetometers and all of that, but wanted to see and hear the former president, see what was happening at the rally. So, as we're driving around that morning, you can see people walking through each other's yards and making their way to that area. And that looks to be the people who tried to warn these officers about what was happening on that roof."
The gunman's clear line of sight to the former president has sparked numerous questions as to how the Secret Service handled the rally, prompting President Biden to order an independent review of the agency's actions surrounding the event.
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The Secret Service source's statement to Scripps News confirms that the building was a blind spot on the security radar, but the source says it was up to local law enforcement to sweep it, as it was outside of the perimeter that the agency would secure. But in a statement to Scripps News, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Police said the department provided "all resources" that the Secret Service requested for Trump's rally, including 30 to 40 troopers who helped secure the inside perimeter, but that it "was not responsible for securing" the building or the property it resides on.
Meanwhile, in an interview with CNN, Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe said one of his officers did encounter the shooter on the rooftop but that the officer "dropped his grip and fell to the ground" after the shooter turned toward him. Slupe said the shooter likely started firing shortly thereafter, but he defended the actions of his officers.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said her agency is participating in the president's investigation into the assassination attempt "to understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again." The findings from the president's internal review will be shared with the public.
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