'It just feels like a huge security failure to me.'
A police officer failed to stop Donald Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks after finding him on a roof with a rifle.
Crooks, 20, fired several shots in an attempt to assassinate the former president during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds, Pennsylvania on Saturday.
He missed his target but killed one member of the audience, father-of-two Corey Comperatore, 50, who dived to protect his wife and daughter.
Trump’s right ear was pierced in the shooting, the former president claimed on social media.
Moments before taking the first shot, a local police officer confronted Crooks on the rooftop less than 150metres from where the presumptive Republican nominee was speaking.
Crooks first came to the attention of police when rally spectators spotted him acting strangely outside the campaign event.
They had seen the 20-year-old pacing near magnetometers, according to a law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to discuss the investigation.
Despite being told Crooks was climbing a ladder, from which he bear crawled into position, officers struggled to locate him.
Rallygoers can be heard shouting ‘he’s got a gun’ in footage from the event, and one witness told BBC they were pointing to his exact spot on the roof.
Video footage shows a member of the public speaking to a police officer metres away shortly before shots rang out.
Eventually one did follow Crooks onto the roof, according to Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe.
But the officer promptly retreated, reportedly without their own gun, when Crooks turned his AR-style rifle on them.
‘All I know is the officer had both hands on the roof to get up on the roof, never made it because the shooter had turned towards the officer, and rightfully and smartly, the officer let go,’ Slupe said.
Crooks then started shooting in the direction of Trump, at which point Secret Service snipers shot him, according to officials.
It’s raised questions about why a rooftop so close to Trump, with a clear line of sight to the stage, was unguarded and unmonitored during the rally.
Greg Smith, who had spotted Crooks and pointed him out to police, told the Daily Mail: ‘I’m thinking to myself, “Why is Trump still speaking on this stage right now? Why is he still up there talking?”
‘I saw Secret Service blow his head off.’
He added: ‘At this point, I’m feeling, as I think about it more and more, it just feels like a huge security failure to me.
‘This isn’t a big place, there’s not a lot of buildings around here, why is everything not covered.’
A Secret Service spokesperson claimed the job of securing the event’s perimeter isthe responsibility of local law enforcement.
But no officers had been assigned to the rooftop, despite agents responsible for securing the area flagging it as a security risk, NBC News reported.
Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger has tried to deflect blame, saying: ‘They had meetings in the week prior. The Secret Service ran the show.
‘They were the ones who designated who did what. In the command hierarchy, they were top, they were No. 1.’
At less than 150metres away from where Trump was speaking, it would have been easy for a decent marksman to hit their target from the rooftop.
It’s a distance at which US Army recruits must hit a human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M-16 rifle.
Crooks, however, was no marksman, if the claim of one person who attended the same high school is to be believed.
He had tried out for Bethel Park High School’s rifle team, which turned him away because he was a bad shooter, said Frederick Mach a current captain of the team who was a few years behind Crooks at the school.
The gun used by Crooks had been bought by his father, but it is not yet known whether he took it without his dad’s permission, Kevin Rojek, FBI special agent in charge in Pittsburgh, said.
Crooks’ motives remain unknown.
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