The mystery surrounding the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump on July 13 has deepened with yet more video surfacing that appears to show the would-be assassin walking around the rally site in the hours before Trump’s event in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, perched on a rooftop that was strangely unsecured by Secret Service personnel and started taking rifle shots at Trump. While Trump was only grazed in the ear, 50-year-old firefighter and father Corey Comperatore was killed, and another man was seriously injured.
Several rally attendees, as seen in cell phone videos, spotted Crooks and thought he looked suspicious, but could not convince police on the scene to take them seriously. One woman who was there can be heard in a recording shouting “he’s got a gun.”
Now, newly circulating video, allegedly taken by a vendor selling hats at the rally, appears to show Crooks wandering about the rally site in the hours before the near-tragedy. The unidentified vendor posted the video on TikTok with a caption saying it showed a “terrifying moment.” The account holder said they discovered the sighting while reviewing phone footage taken that day when the business was “trying to sell out patriotic hats.”
One portion of the video appears to showCrooks more than an hour and a half before he opened fire.
A few seconds after the shooting, a Secret Service sniper took Crooks out from hundreds of yards away, but the nation continues to question the agency’s competence. Why were there no Secret Service agents stationed on this building roof which had a clear line of sight to the stage? Shockingly, former Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle’s first answer to this question in the aftermath was to say that since the roof was sloped, they decided it was not safe to put agents up there.
The video emerged after the release of a preliminary investigative report by Louisiana Republican House Rep. Clay Higgins. Higgins wrote that he tried to examine Crooks’ body when he traveled to the medical examiner’s office in Pennsylvania, but was thwarted. Why? The FBI had released the body for cremation ten days earlier.
