A terrifying new video shows Donald Trump’s would-be assassin loitering around the rally grounds about an hour before the shooting took place.
The new clip, first reported by WTAE in Pittsburgh, sees Thomas Crooks, 20, walking alone, far from the rest of the enthusiastic crowd that waited in the blazing sun to hear the former president speak on July 14 in the town of Butler.
Crooks is seen at 5:03 p.m. at a building just outside the secured perimeter. The crazed gunman opened fire on Trump at 6:11 p.m., wounding the Republican candidate in the ear and killing retired Fire Chief Corey Comperatore.
When he first appears in the video, Crooks is walking away from the crowd past a warehouse. The camera pans away from him for a few seconds and then catches him again, this time standing in place and looking up at something.
This video is the latest example of Crooks’ bizarre behavior leading up to the attempted murder, which did not come to the attention of the Secret Service until minutes before the attack.
By the time a photo of Crooks was circulated to officers around 5:40 p.m., security had lost track of him, allowing him to stand on top of the American Glass Research building and open fire.
In the first clip featuring Crooks, the shooter can be seen walking just outside the security perimeter past several buildings
When he is seen again, Crooks appears to be looking up at something
Crooks is seen opening fire on Donald Trump moments before he himself is shot dead by a Secret Service sniper
The man who shot the video told the station he was just trying to capture the size of the crowd. It wasn’t until he watched the clip after the shooting that he noticed the shooter was being recorded.
“I wanted to pan the crowd because it was a huge crowd, so I was just enjoying the moment. So this was before the shooting. Obviously I had no idea how that day, how that day was going to end,” the unnamed man said.
‘When I saw the video last night, and I was flipping through my video clips and I saw it, I got so cold that I couldn’t fall asleep right away…
At the time the video was taken, Crooks had already been flagged as a suspect by police. By the time two officers approached him to check on him, he was on the roof, crawling on his stomach.
“He’s got a gun,” a bystander yelled. “I didn’t sleep well. There’s – there’s something. There’s really something wrong with this,” he said.
One officer lifted the other to the edge of the roof. As the officer pulled his head over the edge, a long-haired young man with glasses turned toward him, brandishing an AR-15-style rifle. The officer fell back to the ground, the Butler County sheriff said.
Crooks, an introverted 20-year-old computer nerd who had just landed a spot in an engineering program at university, turned to face his target, who was about 120 yards away.
He fired multiple shots at Trump, hitting the former president’s ear, killing one bystander and wounding two others, before Secret Service snipers killed him with return fire from a nearby building.
Trump suffered an injury to his ear but turned to the crowd and shouted, “Fight!”
This account of the first assassination attempt to wound a U.S. president since 1981 is based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including police officers, Crooks’ high school friends and witnesses who were at the rally, along with public documents and news reports.
Crooks fired his gun at about 6:10 p.m., according to a Reuters photographer at the rally. Trump winced and grabbed his right ear. Secret Service agents tackled the former president, and several supporters ducked for cover.
A bullet struck what appeared to be the hydraulic line of a forklift holding a row of speakers on the right side of the stage. Fluid sprayed the crowd and the arm of the lift collapsed. Screams were heard on the left where a spectator had been fatally shot.
As Secret Service agents tackled the former president, some supporters rushed to safety. Others grabbed children and rushed to the gates.
“The crowd was not what you would expect from a crowd that has just been through something like this,” said Saurabh Sharma, a Trump supporter who was seated near the front.
“Everyone was very quiet. There were a few women who were crying. They said, you know, ‘I can’t believe they tried to kill him.’
Four days after the attempted assassination, a coherent picture emerged of the moments leading up to the shooting. But Crooks’ ideology and reasons for pulling the trigger remained a mystery.
A Federal Bureau of Investigation review of Crooks’ phone found that he had searched for images of both President Joe Biden and Trump, as well as other public figures, in the days before the shooting, the New York Times reported Wednesday. The Times cited U.S. lawmakers with knowledge of the law enforcement investigation.
Crooks had been looking up the dates of Trump’s public appearances and the Democratic National Convention, the report said. He had also searched his phone for “major depressive disorder,” the Times said.
It appears Crooks spent some time preparing for the Trump event.
He bought ammunition on the day of the protest, going to a gun store in his hometown of Bethel Park to pick up 50 rounds, according to a joint bulletin issued this week by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is leading the investigation.
According to the bulletin, he built three homemade bombs, two of which he found in his car and another in his house.
In the preceding months, the bulletin reported, Crooks had “received several packages, including some marked as containing potentially hazardous material.”
During the rally, Crooks drew the attention of local police when he walked around the grounds before Trump took the stage.
According to Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe, a Trump supporter who was seated at the front of the rally as a special guest, an officer reported a suspicious person and took a photo that was electronically sent to other officers on the scene.
As two Butler Township police officers responded to the call, people in the crowd saw a man already on the roof.
Slupe told Reuters that the officer who initially climbed onto the roof didn’t have time to grab his weapon when Crooks turned on him. He had no choice but to drop back to the ground.
Secret Service officials have said their agency is responsible for securing the area within the event’s security perimeter.
The building Crooks used was just outside it. But some former agency officials and other security experts have disputed that assertion, arguing that buildings with a direct line of sight and within the former president’s shooting range should have been swept by the agency’s sniper teams and kept under constant surveillance.
Local officials strongly oppose any suggestion that local or state law enforcement is responsible for building security.