Footage posted to social media late Sunday showed several bystanders yelling and directing at least one officer to the roof of a nearby store, where authorities said the suspect, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, opened fire on Trump and attendees before being shot and killed by officers.
In the new video, one man yells, “Cops! Cops!” as other officers point toward the building. “He’s on the roof!” a woman says. The video also shows officers in black uniforms looking up to the top of the building.
Growing evidence suggests police knew of Crooks’ presence before he opened fire, forcing the Secret Service to explain what analysts are describing as a major security failure after Crooks opened fire on the rally, wounding Trump and injuring two audience members and leaving one dead.
The Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle sent a memo to her staff on Sunday praising the swift efforts to move Trump to a safe location after the shooting. Also Sunday, President Biden said he had ordered an “independent review” of the security at the rally. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Monday echoed the call for an independent investigation, calling the assassination attempt a “security failure.”
According to a Washington Post analysis of footage of the incident, Crooks began firing two minutes and two seconds into the newly released video, which begins with a man’s voice saying people are pointing at the roof. The analysis found that the shooting began 86 seconds after the first audio of a call to police was heard. The analysis synchronised multiple videos with audio coming from Trump’s bullhorn as he addressed supporters at an agricultural fair in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
The new video corroborates previously reported statements from other witnesses who, in interviews with The Post and other media, warned police that a man had climbed onto the roof of Agul’s business. International manufacturer of industrial equipment.
The Agulhas Building was not within a secure area guarded by the Secret Service, so members of the public had to pass through metal detectors before entering.
While Secret Service agents monitored the event inside the secured area, local county police officers provided security around the perimeter, The Washington Post reported. Officials said that while it’s common for the Secret Service to delegate this task to local police, the perimeter security plan was developed and approved by the Secret Service and is ultimately part of the Secret Service’s overall security plan for the event.
The uniforms and police insignia worn by the officers in the new video appear to match those of the Butler Township Police Department, and local and county officials said law enforcement personnel were present at the incident, but the department did not respond to questions from The Washington Post.
Ben Mazer, who watched the incident from just outside the security perimeter, told The Washington Post that he had called police twice within a two-minute span to report seeing a suspicious man on the roof of a building. Mazer confirmed that he is seen in the newly released video clip, and said he first alerted officers about 30 seconds before the time period seen on video.
The officers “didn’t say anything” to Mather on either call, Mather said. On the first call, Mather said he saw a man on the roof in a crouching position moving forward and looked toward the building. On the second call, the man was lying down, so Mather said he advised the officers to move to a location where they could see the man.
“I turned around to go back to the area and then I heard gunshots. Then it was chaos,” said Mather, 41, a welder who lives near the scene.
Mather said he never saw the man on the roof with a gun, and the newly released video does not show one.
Another witness, Greg Smith, told BBC News that he saw Crooks crawling on the roof of Agul with a rifle and then spent two or three minutes with other attendees outside the secured area trying to call police. Smith said he was disappointed that Trump had not been removed from the stage before shots rang out.
“Police are running around on the ground,” Smith said. “We’re yelling, ‘Hey, there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle,’ and they’re like, ‘What? What?’ They don’t know what’s going on.”
Smith did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
Butler County Sheriff Michael T. Throop told The Washington Post that a local police officer confronted Crooks before the shooting, though it was not immediately clear whether that was the officer seen searching the building in the newly released video footage.
According to Sheriff Sloop, officers received a report of a suspicious man and went onto the roof to check, but the suspect pointed a gun at the officers, who were holding onto the edge of the roof and unable to get their hands on their guns, so were forced to climb down.
“He let go because he didn’t want to be killed,” Sheriff Sloop said. The gunman then began firing into the rally, the sheriff said.
Executives at Agri International, which makes quality-control equipment for the bottling industry, told The Post that the company had worked with local police on security issues before the incident. William Bellis, the company’s chief financial officer, said police had blocked off public access to the company’s parking lot and made the space available for law enforcement.
Bellis said getting onto the roof of Agul’s building wouldn’t have been easy. “If you were on the roof, you would have needed a ladder,” he said shortly after Saturday’s shooting. Aerial video footage from after the shooting showed a ladder leaning up against the building that night. It’s unclear when it was placed there.
Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
