Three days after Donald Trump came close to being assassinated by a sniper’s bullet, the town of Butler, Pennsylvania, was attempting to return to normality as questions continue to swirl about security lapses that preceded the shooting.
It is now believed that Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old suspect, was spotted by law enforcement officials on the roof of a glass research company at 5.45pm, nearly 30 minutes before shots were fired that injured Trump, killed a former fire chief and injured two others in the crowd.
According to local news reports, a police officer with the county’s emergency services warned a command center that a man with a range-finder had been scoping out the roof of the building that would become Crooks’s reported firing position. The man, believed to be Crooks, later returned with a backpack.
At the time of the shooting, at 6.15pm, moments after Trump began to address the crowd, the eight-member team of snipers and spotters from Beaver county’s emergency service unit were inside the research factory when the suspect was already on the roof.
Failures in the operation to protect the former president – known to the US Secret Service as a “zero-fail” mission – is now the focus of at least three federal investigations.
On Tuesday, the Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, who is facing calls to resign and will testify before a congressional committee on Friday, said the presidential protections agency had decided not to guard the roof because it was too slanted.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” she told ABC News. “The decision was made to secure the building from inside.”
On Sunday, Cheatle sent an email to her agents praising their fast efforts to move Trump to safety after shots were fired.
Trump’s rally came at a busy time for the agency – it had just wrapped up security at the Nato summit in Washington and was preparing for the Republican convention in Milwaukee. On the day of the Butler rally, it was also detailed to protect the first lady, Jill Biden, in Pittsburgh, and Vice-President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia.
The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, vowed on Tuesday to discover what went wrong, a day after president Biden announced an independent investigation.
“We’ve got to get answers obviously,” the Louisiana congressman told Republican delegates in Milwaukee. “Obviously, there were security lapses there. We have a job to do, and it will be done.”
The renewed focus on security failures in Butler comes after efforts to establish a motive for the shooting have come up short. The FBI has said the suspect’s cellphone yielded little, but it has emerged that 10 weapons were recovered from the shooter’s home, and he had visited a gun range south of Pittsburgh a day earlier. He had also purchased a step ladder from Home Depot and 50 bullets from a local gun shop on Saturday morning.
Crooks was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper team after he had fired about eight shots at Trump. That came 86 seconds after rally-goers first tried to alert police officers to the threat.
In the new video obtained by the Washington Post, a man can be heard to shout shouts “Officer! Officer!” as others point toward the building. “He’s on the roof!” a woman says. The video clip also shows a police officer looking up toward the roof of the building.
In Butler on Tuesday, townsfolk said they were divided over whether the officer who scaled the ladder to confront Crooks but then turned back was a hero or had failed in their responsibility.
The Butler county sheriff, Michael Slupe, defended the officer’s decision to stand down.
“People think the officers are supermen like you hold on the roof with one hand while you are hanging on for dear life and pull a gun out. It doesn’t work that way,” Slupe said.
At a minimum, some said, the attempted intervention probably caused Crooks to panic and put him off his aim.
Ben Berry, a 38-year-old masonry worker from Butler, said the people in the audience were “disappointed” that after waiting in the heat for eight hours, Trump’s address was brutally cut short by the assassination attempt.
“It would suck no matter who you were going to see. People are upset about that but happy that he’s still alive,” Berry said.
“They could have killed Trump with all the time they lost. It’s messed up that witnesses had seen the shooter, and now the Butler police are trying to blame it on the Secret Service – and they’re trying to blame it on the local cops.”
The Butler county district attorney, Richard Goldinger, said the Secret Service had ultimate responsibility for security of the event, telling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that “they’re in charge, so they have to make sure all the Is are dotted and the Ts are crossed”.
Three days after Trump’s attempted assassination thrust the farming community into the spotlight, residents say they are keen to put the episode behind them.
In two weeks, the Butler farm show, which began with a plowing contest in 1947 and is said to be one of the best in country, is set to take place on the same fair ground as Trump’s rally.
“We are a farming community, and people prepare for it all summer for it, so it’s a big deal,” said Kayla Wynn, 40, who is planning to bake bread, pies and cupcakes for competition. Wynn predicted that the event would be more somber than usual. “People will put on their best face because that’s what we do around here, but it’s not going to be the same.”
Ultimately, she said, the community would rally around the local police: “We would always support our local police. We all know them, they’re part of the community. I don’t like to think they would have made a mistake – I think they startled the kid – but they’re beginning to feel some heat from the community.”
