BUTLER, Pa. — When Amy Smith thinks back to July 13, she’s met with conflicting feelings.
“It feels like an eternity ago, but it feels like yesterday at the same time,” Smith said.
It’s been one year since 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, the man identified by the FBI, climbed the roof of American Glass Research and fired eight rounds from 150 yards away at then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. He was just minutes into a campaign speech to more than 15,000 rallygoers at the Butler Farm Show grounds.
More: ‘That throbbing feeling’: Trump’s reminder of the threat to his life
Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old husband, father and volunteer firefighter from Sarver, was killed and three others wounded, including Trump, who miraculously escaped the ensuing chaos with a minor ear injury.
Smith is one of several family members who operate Brenckle’s Farms and Greenhouses, which is across the street from the American Glass Research property. Smith and family members joined hundreds of other spectators on the AGR property to peer through a chain-link fence into the Farm Show grounds where Trump spoke.
It didn’t feel safe.
“There was a vibe,” Smith said.
“I was shocked we were even allowed over there,” added Stephanie Costlow, Smith’s sister. “We were right there. We witnessed it all.”
They remember the chaos that unfolded moments into Trump’s speech as law enforcement closed in on Crooks’ location.
Smith’s husband, Greg Smith, gave one of the first interviews from the scene, in which he told the BBC how he was trying to alert police to Crooks’ presence before the shooting.
“There’s a guy on the roof with a rifle,” Greg Smith recalled telling law enforcement in the viral interview, which was shared on social media by Elon Musk, among others.
In the days that followed, scores of people, mostly reporters, from around the world called the Smiths, visited the business and went to their home. They even received death threats.
“Afterwards it was awful,” Costlow said. “There was press everywhere, especially our business. They were out in our pavilion, thousands of people, for months. That was the hard part, because it was every day, and we were trying to get over it.”
A growing, rural community in the heart of MAGA country, Butler County has long boasted about being the birthplace of the Jeep.
But within 26 seconds on a sweltering hot July day in 2024 it became known around the world as a crime scene, the site of an attempted assassination of a former and future American president.
Most residents don’t talk about the tragedy that’s now forever carved in American political history.
“It’s not because they forgot about it,” says Jim Hulings, the 80-year-old Zelienople resident who was tapped to lead the Butler County Republican Party a month before the rally. “It’s because they don’t want to think about it.”
Some seek closure. Others demand answers about inadequate measures taken to protect Trump and rallygoers.
“It should have never happened,” Smith said.
Butler County residents have collectively coped with the loss of a respected community member and the trauma of witnessing deadly violence firsthand.
“The people around Corey, they saw him get shot,” Hulings said. “He died on top of his family trying to save them. Two other guys got shot. The bullets were zinging over our heads. There were young kids, young people there who had never seen violence in their life.”
Concerns before Crooks
Hulings never thought something like a political assassination attempt could happen in Butler, especially not to Trump in a county where 65% of voters have for decades backed the GOP presidential candidate. Not in a community with a low crime rate that turned out roughly 50,000 supporters to the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport when Trump campaigned there four years earlier.
There were signs of trouble, though, that concerned Hulings on the eve of the rally.
“People started to worry about stuff the night before when we were allegedly trained,” he said. “The training was abysmal. There was a hundred people. They walked us around the grounds, but we couldn’t hear what the guy was saying who was supposed to be training us.”
Trump supporters who traveled from afar were already camped out in their cars near the venue, he recalled. He worried about parking and the distance people would have to walk between the parking lot and venue.
He wasn’t the only one concerned. U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly and the county sheriff each placed calls to the FBI field office in Pittsburgh around July 4 to express their worries about the venue. The Butler County Fairgrounds would have been a better option, Kelly believed, since the regional airport where Trump previously spoke was booked. But by that point the Trump campaign had already signed a contract to use the location.
The Butler County Department of Emergency Services, which coordinates fire and EMS and operates the 911 center, was preparing for high heat and high humidity for a venue with virtually no shade cover. People would be standing in the summer sun for hours. More than 15 agencies were pulled in to help that day, including a special medical response team from the state.
“From the beginning” there were concerns, said emergency services Director Steve Bicehouse. “We didn’t say it, because we won’t do that. We adapt and we do what we have to do.”
Paramedics and emergency medical technicians on July 13 treated 250 people and released 242 of them on scene, most of them for heat-related medical issues. Six more were transported by ambulance and two others, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, the two men who were critically injured by Crooks’ gunfire, were taken to a hospital by helicopter.
The U.S. Secret Service rushed Trump from the rally. Comperatore was pronounced dead at the scene.
Rob McLafferty, Butler County’s 911 director, was at the rally with Bicehouse that day. He remembers calling dispatchers to request helicopters while simultaneously treating shooting victims.
“I’d asked for two aircraft when I called,” he said. “Our folks said, ‘there’s already four on standby. The closest two have 15-minute ETAs, and you’re going to get these two aircraft.’ They knew we were going to be asking for that resource. They knew that was coming. They were busy, and yet they picked up the phone and called both of the local helicopter services before we even asked.”
Chris Beck, who’s now the department’s quality assurance and education supervisor, was running the 911 Center that day. Dispatchers monitored the rally from a TV broadcast.
“We knew before the first call came in that there was some incident,” Beck said. “We didn’t know what at that point. For as chaotic as things were, the 911 staff was a well-oiled machine.”
No one was panicking, even as nearly 20 people called in to report the shooting.
Bicehouse remembers how other first responders at the scene quickly pivoted from caring for patients suffering from heat exhaustion to treating shooting victims.
“They went rushing right to the front to try to take care of the people who were there,” he said. “It just shows the character and courage and the commitment and the training of these volunteers, mostly. They didn’t think about the surreal moment until afterward when it all settled down and it was like, ‘holy crap. What just happened?'”
In the days that followed, first responders met for what they call a “critical incident stress debriefing.” It became clear that the rally had a lasting effect on them, Bicehouse said.
“There’s still trauma out there,” he said. “We still think about it, we still deal with it. So it never goes away from us. We’ll always be linked to that day.”
Many of the emergency responders knew Comperatore, a longtime volunteer firefighter who had served a stint as chief of the Buffalo Township Fire Co.
“Not only did we lose a responder, but we lost somebody who was well liked,” McLafferty said. “He was just there with his family. Didn’t do anything wrong. He died trying to protect his family.”
Coping with tragedy
Shanea Clancy, a lifelong Butler County resident, is a forensic trauma-informed registered nurse whose consulting firm has provided community members with mental health services since the shooting. For many, the initial shock of the shooting turned into post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Because it was in my backyard — I grew up literally 10 minutes from where the attempt happened — the response was really about mobilizing resources, providing support, consultations, different ways to debrief, especially for a lot of folks who were not only there, but who responded,” Clancy said. “They experienced secondhand trauma.”
Hulings noted that the deeply religious community leaned on their faith to heal. He remembers driving through Butler Sunday morning, the day after the shooting.
“Every church we went past — and there’s a church on every corner — the parking lot was full,” Hulings said.
Searching for answers
A whiteboard towers over U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly’s desk inside his Butler office.
“Attempted Assass. Task Force” is scrawled along the top.
Beneath those four words are three columns. One, in black marker, is titled “site selection process.” Another has the heading “Security/Law Enforcement.”
The third column stands out prominently.It’s the only one written in red ink.
“Why was Trump allowed on stage?” it says.
For Kelly, who grew up on his father’s car lots in Butler before taking over the family dealership, it’s a question that’s eaten at him since the assassination attempt.
More: Pa. congressman continues seeking answers to Trump assassination attempt a year later
House Speaker Mike Johnson named Kelly chairman of the task force that lawmakers unanimously created to probe the security lapses. But with only five months until the end of the 118th session of Congress, the task force had to work fast to produce a report by the end of 2024. Kelly believed that federal agencies wouldn’t fully cooperate with the task force when it came to providing certain documentation or granting access to employees for interviews. They couldn’t answer certain questions because their agency’s own internal investigations were still ongoing, Kelly said.
“There was no perimeter set up,” said Kelly, whose office is adorned with a statuette of Trump in the moments after he was shot — fist in the air, shouting “fight” to the crowd. “They had a drone and the drone didn’t fly. They were using cell phones to communicate with each other. They had two separate command posts. They had no covering over the fence.
“There were four members of Secret Service,” Kelly continued. “Homeland flew in 16 people. They got to the site at 10 o’clock that morning. They had never been on the site. There was no site preparation. There was nothing put in place for security, and it wasn’t until the actual morning of the event that anybody had even walked the surface of it. How could you be so ill-prepared? I can’t get an answer to that.”
Kelly wants to know why security for the rally was so unlike other campaign events coordinated by the Secret Service.
More: What went wrong? How did Secret Service allow shooter to get so close to Trump?
He wants to know why local law enforcement wasn’t given more direction from their federal counterparts.
He wants to know why Crooks was able to fly a drone over the rally site, and why the Secret Service’s own drone was inoperable that day.
He wants to know if someone on the federal level will ever take responsibility for the security failures, instead of blaming local law enforcement.
“They did everything they were asked to do,” Kelly said about local first responders.
And he wants to know why Trump was ever allowed to take the stage when law enforcement was still trying to locate a suspicious person, who had been spotted with a rangefinder and later a firearm just outside the perimeter of the venue.
The lack of answers, Kelly said, has only made matters worse for federal agencies and the public.
“That you can’t get direct answers is what gives rise to the fact that there’s conspiracy theories,” Kelly said.
‘Too many coincidences’
Like Kelly, Hulings and other Republicans are frustrated that so many questions remain unanswered.
“There are too many coincidences for there not to be a conspiracy,” Hulings said as he drove the hilly countryside of Butler County en route to the home of Bill Adams, a local Republican donor.
Adams, 80, was a successful innovator whose company, Adams Manufacturing, made products sold at major hardware stores. Adams, who has since sold his business, lives in a white house that stands alone atop a large hill in the rural, picturesque town of Portersville. Waiting with Adams was Chester “Chet” Jack, a 66-year-old member of both the state and county Republican committees.
Hulings calls Adams the party’s “honey bee.”
“And if he’s the honey bee, then Chet is the worker bee,” he quipped.
Adams and Jack each believe there’s much more to know about what happened that day, but they don’t consider themselves conspiracy theorists.
Hulings, Jack and Adams were behind a 2024 petition drive that urged Butler County District Attorney Richard A. Goldinger to ask the chief judge of the Butler County Court of Common Pleas to launch a grand jury investigation.
A grand jury would have enforceable subpoena power and be able to compel officials at all levels of government to testify, they argued. The 8,000 other people who signed the petition agreed.
Goldinger, however, told the men in a Nov. 19 letter that after meeting with Pennsylvania State Police to learn details of its probe, he’d reached the conclusion that a grand jury wasn’t necessary. It would only reach the same conclusion that state police and others would come to, he wrote.
“It’s one of our residents who got murdered,” Jack said. “Yeah, it’s a big deal that Trump got shot and all that, but you have a local guy that got murdered and there’s all these outstanding questions.”
They’re convinced someone is trying to hide something.
Adams wonders if Crooks was “seduced, corrupted or led astray” by someone else.
“You’re led to believe there’s got to be some reason that they’re not answering the questions,” he said.
Jack held gatherings with other Republicans who attended the rally to talk about what they experienced. People were “wigged out about this whole thing,” he said.
“It was a terrifying day for them,” he said. “The conversations have gone on, but the attitude is that this whole thing’s getting whitewashed, that there’s more to it and we don’t know it. Without the transparency, people are going to jump to that conclusion.”
When Trump returned Oct. 5 to finish the speech he had started months early, security was extremely tight. It stood in stark contrast to what Hulings had experienced July 13, 2024.
“It was a mind-blower,” he said about Trump’s return, which featured a Who’s Who of GOP stars, including now-Vice President J.D. Vance and Musk.
Moving on
It’s common for trauma to reemerge around the anniversaries of tragic events, Clancy said. She encourages anyone who needs help to call 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Butler residents don’t want to be remembered for this one day. They don’t want to be defined by it.
“This really isn’t any kind of identity for Butler County, even though it has been placed — on such a large scale — in a negative limelight,” Clancy said. “But the community is very supportive, very resilient. I don’t think Butler County will be remembered for this.”
Helen Comperatore, Corey’s Comperatore’s widow, doesn’t want anyone to forget about her husband — not only for the heroism he showed when he died, but also for the life he lived before it.
“I want people to remember Corey as the handsome, very happy and proud husband of Helen and father to Allyson and Kaylee,” she said. “He was the guy that was always outside playing with his Dobermans, or fishing with his wife at the river in their boat. Except Sundays, that was the Lord’s day, and he would be at church in the morning.”
Matthew Rink is a USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania investigative journalist.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Butler PA contending with shocks of Trump shooting a year later
