New video sent to TribLive appears to show Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman who killed one person and injured 3 others — including former President Donald Trump — at Saturday’s rally, lurking just outside Butler Farm Show grounds about an hour before he opened fire.
Authorities said Crooks, a 20-year-old nursing home worker from Bethel Park, managed to climb onto a roof and fire at Trump just minutes into the former president’s speech despite the presence of numerous heavily armed Secret Service agents and local police officers.
The video comes from a rallygoer who has asked to remain anonymous. He said he arrived at the rally around 10 a.m. with his son. He said they found seats in the grandstands behind Trump — which ultimately put him directly in the line of Crooks’ fire.
He said he began taking video of the crowd, which he said seemed to be about 15,000 people.
In the footage, a figure in the lower right is thought to be Crooks.
“I wanted to pan the crowd because it was a massive crowd, so I was just taking in the moment,” the man told TribLive news partner WTAE. “So this was before the shooting. Obviously had no idea how that day, how that day would end.”
He said the video was captured at 5:06 p.m. Saturday.
The full video shows the crowd, along with multiple law enforcement vehicles in the area facing the building that Crooks appears to be scoping out.
“When I saw the video last night, when I was going back through my my video clips and saw him, I was chilled to the point where I couldn’t fall asleep right away,” the man told WTAE.
“I didn’t sleep well. There’s — there’s something. Something really went wrong with this.”
Trump was grazed in the ear, a Buffalo Township man was killed and two other attendees were seriously wounded before the Secret Service killed Crooks in front of a crowd of thousands of fervent Trump supporters.
