Some eyewitnesses have offered their accounts of the moments after 20-year-old shooting suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at former President Donald Trump at Saturday’s rally, fatally wounding one attendee and critically injuring two others:
“I thought it was firecrackers to begin with,” one witness told reporters, according to CBS News. “Somebody over there was screaming ‘he’s been shot, he’s been shot.’”
An attendee named Ben Macer told CBS Pittsburgh that he saw the suspect moving from “roof to roof” before shots were heard. “When I turned around to go back to where I was, it was when the gunshots started, and then it was just chaos, and we all came running away, and that was that,” Macer said.
Eyewitness Greg Smith reportedly pointed Crooks out to police: “We noticed the guy bear-crawling up the roof of the building beside us, 50 feet away. He had a rifle,” Smith told BBC News. “We’re pointing at him, the police are down there running around on the ground, we’re like ‘Hey man, there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle’ … and the police did not know what was going on.”
Another witness named Brandon Christie told Fox News anchor Sean Hannity that he and relatives ducked to the ground as Secret Service agents fired at Crooks: “There was just blood everywhere,” Christie said.
NBC News spoke to a man named Joseph who reportedly “counted seven shots” of gunfire before witnessing an attendee get fatally shot in the head.
“The man beside me suffered a gunshot wound to the head, was instantly killed, fell to the bottom of the bleachers,” he said. “Another woman looked like she got hit in the forearm or hand. And at that point in time, it was rather chaotic at that point … half the people were looking because they thought it was fireworks. I knew it was gunshots right away.”
“It was all of a sudden just chaos,” Senate Republican candidate Dave McCormick, who was sitting in the front row, told CNN. “The Secret Service immediately covered the president, jumped on top of him, and the crowd immediately went to the ground.”
A reporter for the Boston Globe chronicled what he saw firsthand at the rally: “When I looked up, the same agents were shooting in the same direction their guns had been pointed all along,” wrote journalist James Pindell. “I knew they were shooting because I could see smoke from their guns.”
James Sweetland, a retired emergency room physician, performed CPR on a man who’d been shot: “He wasn’t breathing,” he told Time. “I got other people to help me get him on one of the benches, and we got CPR going on him. I could not feel a pulse.”
It’s unclear whether the man Joseph and Sweetland encountered was the single person who was fatally wounded (the identity of the victim has yet to be revealed by the FBI).
Source link : https://www.yahoo.com/news/live/live-updates-fbi-identifies-shooter-in-trump-assassination-attempt-former-president-injured-but-fine-222707967.html
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Publish date : 2024-07-14 12:31:00
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