Investigators on Sunday searched for a motive that would explain why a 20-year-old armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle shot at former President Donald Trump, just days before he was to accept the Republican nomination for president.
The assassination attempt, which wounded Trump and killed one of his supporters, was being treated by the FBI as a possible act of domestic terrorism. And it immediately raised questions about why the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies had not secured a nearby building outside the large outdoor venue where Trump held his rally.
The gunman apparently climbed onto the building’s rooftop with a rifle and fired multiple times, wounding Trump just minutes into his speech on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh.
Within moments, someone shouted “Shooter down” and Secret Service agents, agitated but in control, began moving Trump offstage to safety. “Wait, wait, wait, wait,” he called out. He then made a point of pumping his fist at the crowd and seemed to defiantly shout, “Fight! Fight!” The moment — captured in photos that showed Trump’s fist held aloft, his cheek bloody, with the American flag behind him — roused Trump’s stunned supporters, who broke out in chants of “USA!”
Trump was taken to the hospital Saturday night but was able to walk off his plane unaided when it landed in New Jersey hours later. On Sunday, he vowed to remain “defiant in the face of wickedness” and flew to Milwaukee for the start of the Republican National Convention on Monday, saying he would not let the assassination attempt change his “scheduling, or anything else.”
The gunman, who was identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh suburb, was killed by the Secret Service, the agency said. Law enforcement officials later found a possible rudimentary explosive device in his car, said Paul Abbate, deputy director of the FBI.
The AR-15-type semi-automatic rifle, found next to Crooks’ body, had been bought by Crooks’ father, the FBI said. It was not clear if he had given Crooks the weapon or if Crooks had taken it without permission.
The gunman did not have a criminal history in Pennsylvania’s public court records. A voter-registration record showed that he had registered as a Republican. Federal campaign-finance records also show he donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a liberal voter turnout group, through the Democratic donation platform ActBlue in 2021.
Crooks worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home in his hometown, according to Marcie Grimm, the facility’s administrator. She said employees were shocked to learn that he was the gunman, saying Crooks had “performed his job without concern, and his background check was clean.”
As some Republicans sought to blame the assassination attempt on Democratic rhetoric about the grave threats posed by a second Trump term, President Joe Biden urged Americans not to rush to judgment until investigators could determine a motive.
Speaking to the nation for the third time since the shooting, Biden said the nation needed to “lower the temperature in our politics.”
“We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America,” he said in a prime time speech Sunday night from the Oval Office. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”
Biden said earlier that he had a short conversation with Trump on Saturday night and was grateful that he was “doing well and recovering.”
He also offered condolences to the family of the man who was killed — Corey Comperatore, 50, of Sarver, Pennsylvania, a firefighter and married father of two daughters — and wishes for a speedy recovery to two attendees who were injured. The Pennsylvania State Police identified them as David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, Pennsylvania, and said that both were in stable condition Sunday.
Biden said that he had ordered the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly A. Cheatle, to review security measures for the Republican convention and had asked for an “independent review” of the security measures at the rally in Butler.
Cheatle defended the response of the Secret Service in a memo to her agents. “Our personnel’s reaction at the campaign rally clearly demonstrated that we all rely on our training in times of crises,” she wrote in the memo, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “I am proud of those involved.” Her memo did not address questions over the preparation for the rally.
Investigators have found no evidence indicating that Crooks was part of a larger plot. The FBI was seeking court approval to search his cellphone to learn more about his plans and communications, according to a federal law enforcement official.
The shooting was the first time in more than four decades that a man who had been elected president had been wounded in an assassination attempt. It recalled another period of political violence and instability, in the 1960s, and came during an already tense campaign.
Trump was convicted this year of felonies in New York related to hush-money payments to a porn actor, and he faces three other indictments. Anxious Democrats had been debating whether Biden’s age-related stumbles, evidenced in his halting debate performance last month, made him the best candidate to defeat Trump, with some members of the party openly pressuring Biden to step aside.
As Trump vowed to forge ahead with his campaign, the Biden campaign said it was pulling its television ads as a sign that it was putting politics aside, at least temporarily.
Biden postponed a trip planned for Monday to Austin, Texas. Vice President Kamala Harris postponed a campaign stop planned for Tuesday in Palm Beach County, Florida, where she was to speak about abortion rights, according to two people with knowledge of her plans. But Biden intended to deliver a scheduled speech on Tuesday at an NAACP conference in Las Vegas, the White House said.
Even though the gunman’s motive remained unclear, many Republicans were quick to blame Biden and Democrats for stoking the violence against Trump by assailing him as a threat to democracy. Although the political discourse has grown more violent in recent years, mainly from the right, Republicans argued that similar speech from the left has been overlooked. After the shooting, a staff member for Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., posted a message on Facebook: “Please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time.” She was fired.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, wrote on social media. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Melania Trump, the former first lady, on Sunday posted a statement on social media calling the shooter a “monster” who saw her husband as “an inhuman political machine.” She urged the nation to “ascend above the vitriol, and the simple-minded ideas that ignite violence.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability said it planned to investigate the assassination attempt and had asked the Secret Service director to testify at a hearing July 22.
A Secret Service spokesperson, Anthony Guglielmi, said that since the building where the shooter was positioned was outside the Secret Service perimeter, local law enforcement was to have secured it.
The Secret Service had snipers at Trump’s rally within 200 yards of Crooks, an easy shot for a trained marksman. Just before the shots rang out, some in the crowd said, snipers who were perched atop a barn appeared to have noticed movement nearby. Photographs showed that at least one of the snipers had a white card attached to the scope of his rifle detailing the specific calculations needed to hit the building where Crooks was.
Guglielmi acknowledged reports that some people outside the rally had seen the shooter before he began firing. Guglielmi said police had attempted to locate the shooter but lost visibility of him. Then the shooter jumped on the roof, popped up and started firing, he said.
Guglielmi rejected what he said was “an untrue assertion” that the Secret Service had rebuffed an earlier request by a member of Trump’s team for additional security around the former president.
“In fact, we added protective resources & technology & capabilities as part of the increased campaign travel tempo,” Guglielmi wrote on social media.
Reps. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., and Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., said they planned to introduce a bill to enhance Secret Service protections for Biden and Trump and to extend Secret Service protection to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate for president. His father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle, President John F. Kennedy, were assassinated.
“As reports continue to emerge, it’s clear that more protection is needed for all major candidates for president,” Torres and Lawler said in a statement.
Comperatore was a volunteer firefighter and worked for a plastics manufacturing company.
“Corey dove on his family to protect them last night at this rally,” said Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, adding that he had spoken to Comperatore’s widow. “Corey was the very best of us.”
Dr. James Sweetland, an emergency room physician who was at the rally, said he had rushed to help Comperatore after he was shot. He said Comperatore was lying in a pool of blood, and two people had helped lift him onto a bench so that Sweetland could begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Someone else put pressure on Comperatore’s wound above his ear.
But Sweetland said there was no pulse.
Comperatore’s sister, Dawn Comperatore Schafer, said in a brief interview that her family had “watched him die on the news” and was not yet ready to talk about him. “The hatred for one man,” she said, “took the life of the one man we all love the most.”