A chilling new video shows Donald Trump’s would-be assassin lurking around the rally site about an hour before the shooting occurred.
The new clip, first reported by WTAE in Pittsburgh, see Thomas Crooks, 20, walking alone, away from the rest of the cheering crowd, who waited in the blazing sun to see the former president speak on July 14 in the town of Butler.
At 5:03 p.m., Crooks is seen near a building that sits just outside the security 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 in the opposite direction of the crowd passing by a warehouse. The camera pans away from him for a few seconds and then picks up again, this time standing, looking at something.
This video is the latest illustration of Crooks’ strange behavior prior to the assassination attempt that only sparked Secret Service interest minutes before the attack.
By the time a photo of Crooks was distributed to officers around 5:40 p.m., security had lost track of him, allowing him to take up position on top of the American Glass Research building and open fire.
In the first clip showing Crooks, the gunman is seen walking near some buildings just outside the security perimeter.
When they see him 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 recorded the video told the station he was just trying to capture the size of the crowd. It was only when he reviewed the video after the shooting that he realized he was recording the shooter.
“I wanted to get a panoramic view of the crowd because it was a huge crowd, so I was just enjoying the moment. This was before the shooting. Obviously I had no idea how that day would end,” the anonymous man said.
‘When I saw the video last night, when I was going through my music videos and I saw it, I got so cold that I couldn’t sleep right away…
At the time the video was recorded, Crooks had already been flagged as a suspect by law enforcement. When two police officers approached to examine him, he was on the roof, crawling face down.
“He’s got a gun,” one passerby shouted. “I didn’t sleep well. There’s something. Something really went wrong with this,” he said.
One deputy lifted the other to the edge of the roof. When the deputy poked his head over the edge, a young man with long hair and glasses turned toward him, holding an AR-15-style rifle. The deputy dropped back to the ground, the Butler County sheriff said.
Crooks, an introverted 20-year-old computer genius who had just landed a spot on a university engineering program, turned toward his target about 400 feet away.
He fired several shots at Trump, severing the former president’s ear, killing one audience member and wounding two others before Secret Service snipers in a nearby building killed him with counterfire.
Trump was wounded in the ear, but he still turned to the crowd and said: ‘Fight!’
This account of the first assassination attempt to harm an American president since 1981 is based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including law enforcement officials, Crooks’ schoolmates and witnesses who attended the rally, along with public records and news accounts.
Crooks fired his rifle at about 6:10 p.m., according to a Reuters photographer present at the rally. Trump winced in pain and grabbed his right ear. Secret Service agents tackled the former president to the ground and some supporters dove 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. Liquid spilled into the crowd and the boom of the forklift collapsed. To the left, screams erupted from where a spectator had been fatally shot.
As Secret Service agents attacked the former president, some of his supporters rushed to safety. Others grabbed children and rushed toward the doors.
“The crowd was not what you would expect from a crowd that has just experienced something like that,” said Saurabh Sharma, a Trump supporter sitting near the front.
‘Everyone was very quiet. There were some women crying. They were saying, ‘I can’t believe they tried to kill him.’
Four days after the assassination attempt, a coherent picture of the moments leading up to the shooting began to emerge, but Crooks’ ideology and motives for pulling the trigger remained a mystery.
A review of Crooks’ phone by the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that he had searched for images of both President Joe Biden and Trump, as well as other famous figures, in the days before the shooting, the New York Times reported Wednesday, citing U.S. lawmakers briefed on the police investigation.
Crooks had been looking up dates for Trump’s public appearances and the Democratic National Convention, the report said. He had also searched for “major depressive disorder” on his phone, the Times said.
Crooks appeared to spend at least some time preparing for the Trump event.
He purchased ammunition on the day of the rally and stopped at 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.
He built three homemade bombs, two found in his car and one in his home, the bulletin said.
In the preceding months, the bulletin noted, Crooks had received “multiple packages, including some marked as possibly carrying hazardous material.”
At the rally, Crooks drew the attention of local law enforcement as he walked around the grounds before Trump took the stage.
An officer called in a suspicious person and took a photograph that was distributed electronically to other officers at the scene, according to Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe, a Trump supporter who was sitting near the front of the rally as a special guest.
By the time two Butler Township police officers responded to the call, people in the crowd had already noticed a man on the roof.
Slupe told Reuters the officer who initially climbed onto the roof did not have time to draw his weapon when Crooks turned toward him, leaving him with no choice but to get on 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 the institution, but some former agency officials and other security experts have disputed that claim, arguing that the agency’s sniper teams should have constantly scanned and monitored buildings with a direct line of sight and within firing range of the former president.
Local officials have bristled at any suggestion that city or county law enforcement were responsible for securing the building.