In the aftermath of a dangerous attack in the rally of former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday, details are now emerging that the attacker was spotted by locals who had informed police officers minutes before shooting.
According to a report by The Guardian, attendees of Donald Trump’s rally who sighted the shooter lying flat on roof had alerted officers about it. A video footage of this development is also going viral on social media.
The 20-year-old shooter named Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania fired around six to eight rounds from a distance of approximately 400 feet from where Trump was speaking with an A-R style weapon, presumably a rifle.
A bullet hit Trump’s ear, shot one rally attendee dead and injured two others in the crowd.
In a video posted on X, the locals appeared to be worried about the man on the roof, as his activities looked suspicious.
HOLY SH*T:
It appears that potentially THREE police officers were nonchalantly watching as the shooter was crawling into place.
People began calling out to the police in warning.
Trump should have been evacuated from stage IMMEDIATELY.
This is a MASSIVE FAILURE on all levels. pic.twitter.com/hGQZdB27Uh
— Evan Kilgore 🇺🇸 (@EvanAKilgore) July 15, 2024
He appeared to be crawling on the roof when the bystanders, heard in the reported video started shouting, “Look they’re all pointing, yeah, someone’s up on the top of the roof. There he is right there.”
The public, in the purported video, appeared to be alerting the officers on the ground about the suspected man on the roof nearby the Trump’s rally and in the next moment in the video, a person is heard saying, “Officer, he’s on the roof.”
But to no heed, the rally went on and gunshots were fired by the man Thomas Crooks who was immediately killed by a US Secret Service sniper.
The FBI officials have said that they are treating the assassination attempt of Trump in the rally as a possible domestic terrorism attack and assassination attempt.
Trump, after narrowly escaping the deadly shootout, posted on his social media platform Truth Social, that it “was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”
President Joe Biden, in his address at the Oval Office, said that violence in any form is unacceptable in the US and that the motive of the attack remains unclear.
