This aerial photo of the Butler Farm Show, site of Saturday’s Trump campaign rally, is shown Monday in Butler, Pa. Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt while speaking at the rally.
BUTLER, Pa. — The young man was pacing around the edges of the Donald Trump campaign rally, shouldering a big backpack and peering into the lens of a rangefinder toward the rooftops behind the stage where the former president would stand.
His behavior was so odd, so unlike that of the other rallygoers, that local law enforcement took notice, radioed their concerns and snapped a photo. But then he vanished.
The man didn’t appear again until witnesses saw him climbing up the side of a squat manufacturing building that was within 157 yards from the stage.
That’s where he opened fire, six minutes after Trump began speaking, in an attempt to assassinate the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
The gunman killed one rallygoer and seriously wounded two others. Trump suffered an ear injury but was not seriously hurt. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that, according to a spokesperson for Allegheny Health Network, two attendees who were shot at the rally were upgraded from critical to serious condition as of 1 p.m. Wednesday.
Multiple investigations have been launched, both into the crime itself and how law enforcement allowed it to happen.
It’s becoming increasingly clear this was a complicated failure involving multiple missteps and at least nine local and federal law enforcement divisions that were supposed to be working together.
The Secret Service always partners with local law enforcement when a president, political candidate or other high-level official comes to town, and Saturday’s rally was no different. In theory, more manpower is better.
But it can often create communication problems, and it’s unclear how the information about Thomas Michael Crooks was transmitted. For instance, it’s not clear how widely his photo was circulated or whether everyone was equally aware of the potential threat.
“We are speaking of a failure,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN. “We are going to analyze through an independent review how that occurred, why it occurred, and make recommendations and findings to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would set up a task force to investigate. Security has been stepped up for Trump and President Joe Biden, and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also received a protective detail. Biden has ordered an independent review of the shooting.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general also opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of the shooting.
It will take weeks — if not months — to interview all the officers involved and determine exactly how Crooks was able to pull off the most serious attempt to kill a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.