An eyewitness at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, says he saw what was “clearly blood” on the former president as shots rang out during Saturday afternoon’s event.
Blake Marnell, 59, from San Diego, a supporter who wears a “brick suit” in homage to Trump’s wall, recalled to the Guardian what it was like sitting “front row centre with some friends, watching the president speak” in western Pennsylvania.
“He was speaking about immigration. He had a slide on the big screen, the Jumbotron. I was watching him and then I heard some noises,” he said in a phone interview, noting that he “registered them as coming from my left as I look straight ahead at the president”.
Marnell noted that he “didn’t know” what the sounds, which reports have since indicated were gunshots, were, adding that he did not “have any training that would enable me to recognise gunshots from firecrackers from something else like that”.
“I was hoping that it was a prank, that it was a bad joke,” Marnell said, adding that he saw Trump “essentially being tackled to the ground by the Secret Service”.
Marnell went on: “Then I heard some more noises, which at that point I believed to be shots, based on what the Secret Service was doing. I crouched down and then, seeing there were no more noises, got back up a little bit and tried to pay attention to what they were doing right behind the podium.
“I could hear the Secret Service agents talking. I did not hear any call for medical. I did hear them begin to coordinate, ‘let’s get ready to move him,’ do a countdown. And then they brought him out.”
Marnell said he “was really apprehensive that they were going to carry him, but instead he was on his feet and he was shaking his fist defiantly”.
“I could see blood above his right ear,” he said. “I can’t say where that came from. He could have cut his ear when they tackled him. He could have hit it on the podium. It could be from a gunshot or ricochet. I have no idea where it was.
“There was clearly blood. I can’t even say if it was his blood; a Secret Service agent could have cut their hand and transferred blood to his head … I was optimistic based on the fact that he was defiant, that he was shaking his fist, that they weren’t whisking him away super quickly, that they would allow him to do that, while they were around him protecting him. Just an incredible moment.”
Marnell added that he thought “our country needs to do a better job of settling differences” and that “this is not the path”.
“Nobody believes this is the path. It was hard to have reactions when I didn’t know how serious it was. I was saying a prayer for him, as were many people. We got together,” he said. “We were praying for his safety, I was cautiously optimistic based upon the way I saw him leave, but you can’t always tell.”
Another rallygoer who described himself to CBS News as an emergency room physician recounted walking toward a voice saying: “He’s been shot.”
The rallygoer, whose shirt was bloodstained, said he saw a man with a bullet wound to the head who had been spun around and ended up “jammed between the benches”. He said he had tried to perform CPR on the wounded man, who at the time was about to be loaded into a medical helicopter.
