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A newly surfaced video casts doubt on the timeline of events leading up to the shooting of former President Donald Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The footage, obtained by DailyMail.com and recorded unintentionally by a vendor at the event, shows assailant Thomas Matthew Crooks roaming through merchandise stalls hours before the shooting, conflicting with earlier accounts of his location.
The footage was recorded by Joe Tomko, owner of Iron Clad USA, at 4:26 pm on July 13, and it marks the earliest confirmed sighting of Crooks at the rally.
The video timing aligns exactly with a message from a local police sniper who reported seeing a man believed to be Crooks sitting at a nearby picnic table. However, group texts involving counter-snipers from Beaver, Butler, and Washington Counties indicate that Crooks was seen in a different location around the same time.
Tomko told the outlet he didn’t notice Crooks in his video until he was reviewing all of his footage a week after the assassination attempt.
“I was having breakfast with my parents and my father asked me if I ever looked through all my footage from that day,” Tomko told the outlet. “So I watched it all late in the evening, and I just about jumped out of my skin [when I saw him]; I was in such disbelief.”
In the video, Crooks was by himself, dressed in the same outfit he had on when he was fatally shot by a counter-sniper, reportedly from the Secret Service.
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Tomko noted that he reviewed the video for two days before submitting it to investigators and addressing their questions. He also highlighted that the vendor area had minimal security, permitting anyone to enter from the street. Attendees would pass through these booths before reaching a checkpoint with airport-style security to access the main rally area.
Meanwhile, another sniper, James Woods from Beaver County, had completed his shift and observed an individual matching Crooks’ description about 50 yards from an exit. At 4:26 pm, Woods texted his colleagues to report the suspicious person. Crooks, 20, vanished from view and reappeared just after 6:00 pm when Greg Nicol, another local sniper, spotted him running with a backpack. Nicol attempted to follow Crooks but lost track of him as police arrived in the area.
Video footage captured Crooks climbing onto the roof of a nearby building at around 6:06 pm. Within minutes, local police and the Secret Service were alerted, with a radio call at 6:09 pm notifying agents of “someone on the roof with white shorts.”
The situation escalated at 6:11 pm when Crooks, realizing he was trapped, began shooting, grazing Trump’s right ear as he turned away. Crooks fired a total of eight shots before a Secret Service counter-sniper fatally shot him. The investigation into the shooting is ongoing, with authorities working to piece together Crooks’ movements and motivations.
Last week, bodycam footage from police at the Butler, Pa., rally expressing frustration with the Secret Service for failing to ‘cover’ the rooftop Crooks used to take aim at Trump.
“I f—ing told them that they needed to post guys f—ing over here…I told them that f—ing Tuesday,” a Butler Township police officer was heard saying in audio from his body-worn camera obtained by The Wall Street Journal. “I talked to the Secret Service guys. They’re like, ‘Yeah, no problem. We’re going to post guys over here.”
The video showed one officer talking about a suspicious person they lost who he described as “a gentleman with a flat face that we were looking for earlier. He was creeping people out.”
“He was watching people out in the woods by the water tower. I’m not sure he is the gentleman down or not,” he said.
Around 10 minutes after the shooting, another officer arrived on the scene and was noticeably frustrated.
“I thought you guys were on the roof. I thought it was you. I thought it was you,” the officer said.
“No,” another explained and explained that there were no officers on the roof.
“What the f—,” the officer responded. “Why were we not on the roof? Why weren’t we?”
