Report: Law Enforcement Saw Gunman on Roof 30 Minutes Before He Shot Trump
“According to multiple sources, a law enforcement officer had also previously seen Crooks on the ground and called him in as a suspicious person with a picture prior to 5:45 p.m.”
WPXI reported that law enforcement spotted Thomas Matthew Crooks on the rooftop 30 minutes before he shot former President Donald Trump.
Channel 11′s Nicole Ford confirmed that Beaver County’s ESU team had eight members at the rally, including snipers and spotters. According to Ford’s sources, one of them noticed a suspicious man on a roof near the rally at 5:45 p.m., called it in and took a picture of the person. We have learned from our sources the person in that picture is Thomas Crooks. We’re told it’s not clear if Crooks had a gun with him at that point.
According to multiple sources, a law enforcement officer had also previously seen Crooks on the ground and called him in as a suspicious person with a picture prior to 5:45 p.m. Our sources tell us an officer checked the grounds for Crooks at that point, but did not see him where the first picture was taken.
26 minutes after the second picture of Crooks was taken by law enforcement and the information called in, shots were fired from the roof of the American Glass Research building. Seconds later, a Secret Service sniper returned fire and killed Crooks.
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This story just continues to produce layers of fail.
When milliseconds count, Secret Service snipers are only seconds away.
And with ROE’s preventing them from firing on the criminal when they saw him.
I believe the fact the area outside the venue’s fence was the responsibility of local LE caused confusion. SS snipers inside the perimeter may have been unsure if they were looking at a threat or at a local LEO (as SS snipers may have presumed local LE would have positioned someone on the roof because that’s what they would have done).
That said, if there was any doubt, they should have called for the protectee’s removal from any potential line of fire until the situation was resolved. Also, there’s a report that a SS sniper is now saying he was told to hold his fire after he had determined the person on roof was a certain threat and wasn’t allowed to shot until after the shooter opened fire.
“a report that a SS sniper is now saying he was told to hold his fire after he had determined the person on roof was a certain threat”
Swamp SOP. Like the Arizona gun dealers in Fast and Furious who reported attempts by strawmen to buy rifles for the cartels, and were told by the BATF to consummate those sales or lose their FFLs.
I find that report less than credible. Secret Service snipers are given free reign to neutralize any immediate threat and a guy with a rifle on a roof pointing it at President Trump qualifies.
More likely is that the sniper did not have line of sight so couldn’t take the shot until the guy stuck his head up to shoot.
The USSS can delegate tasks. They cannot delegate responsibility. Their mission was to protect DJT. They failed miserably.
I wonder how much of this is due to Affirmative//DEI hires.
It’s only failure if you think their goal was to keep DJT alive.
That phrase they all have on their squad cars – TO SERVE AND PROTECT – just didn’t quite mean what it says.
“To Serve ourselves and Protect our pensions”
TO SERVE the elite and PROTECT our pensions, indeed.
what makes you think this was a fail?
Wow.
This story just gets uglier and uglier.
BREAKING: Snipers were stationed inside the building as the Trump rally shooter climbed to the roof, a local officer says.
– CBS News
A sniper stationed inside a building is as useful as a football bat, and means as much as tits on fish,
The local PD has now said the building was not their responsibility either. No one will be held accountable. The FBI is currently on cleanup duty for their Democrat masters.
I would tend to believe the local PD over the secret service or the FBI without any question.
In the end, the Secret Service is the organization responsible, regardless of any jobs farmed out to other agencies or departments. I cannot believe that this POS Cheatle hasn’t resigned (and begged forgiveness) yet. Unreal. She has to be a real ghoul to have screwed up this badly (and almost gotten the next President assassinated) and not quit out of plain guilt and shame. It’s unbelievable, really. That someone can screw up so badly, and so seriously – in full view of everyone – and not resign a job she clearly is unable to do in any way, shape, or form. It takes a true psychopath to act like that. A TRUE PSYCHOPATH. Traitor Joe’s junta is full of them, including Joe, himself.
I lean towards trusting the local PD as well, but I’m not going to absolve them of blame either if the story is going to be all systems failure.
I don’t trust the FBI whatsoever. They’re basically the Cheka as far as I’m concerned.
She reports to Mayorkas, need I say more
Joe will be giving her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her service.
She has refused to step down and is obviously protected as if nothing happened. “I take full non-accountability” is what she is doing.
LOL.
But true.
But dei and diversity are important.
If it means assassinations, planes crashing with all seats filled, doctors killing patients with botched medicine and surgery, it’s worth it if those dei screw ups feel good about themselves.
I’m pretty sure that the folks at the federal level only consider this a failure because they missed
That broad is unfit to guard Cheetos.
Clever
The only criminal she has had to deal with is the Frito Bandito.
Hey, now. It ain’t easy being cheesy.
HA been decades since I thought of Chester Cheetah
Beaver County is the next county over from Butler. Beaver, Butler, and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is) Counties basically form a triangle.
To paraphrase Dr Henry Jones;
Trump would been safer with the Marx Brothers.
Or the Keystone Cops.
This just went from incompetent to malicious by those top men refusing to act or authorize any action.
No way he was acting alone.
On the other hand, isn’t it weird that this time the media is not bombarding us with every single detail about the scary boom stick used by the shooter?
The local news keeps saying it’s an “AR-15 style weapon.” They probably don’t want to play it up, because if an almost 80 year old man can get shot in the head with it from under 150 yards and survive…it doesn’t really jive with their previous statements about how deadly such weapons are.
This is one time they wanted it used. How can the Dems move forward if one of their avenues of action is banned? Dems, Anarchists and Commies murdered US presidents…
Yes, but we’ll never get independent verification of the weapon type. No matter what he fired it was going to be reported as an AR-15.
The Overwatch team is last resort, but the event should have been held up until the shooter was apprehended or questioned.
Layers of failure 👍
1. How many total SS agents were there in the Trump detail?
2. Did they have tech that they didn’t use (like drones) or were tech not deployed because of manpower issues?
3. What were their rules of engagement?
All good questions. But, I bet it’s very unlikely any of these questions will be answered in open session, particularly #2 & #3. There’s some small chance the public will learn how big the detail was and what percentage of that day’s detail were ‘temps;’ there’s been multiple reports from reliable news sources that indicate a significant size of the detail were ‘temporarily assigned’ to Trump detail from neighboring field offices. Why temps? Because they took Trump’s normal detail and reassigned most to cover Jill Biden’s campaign stop in Philly on the same day.
Well,,,they were protecting the functioning US Prez…… Dr. Jill Edith Wilson MacBeth Biden.
I heard an interview Monday morning with Mike Johnson at the RNC. He said the first question he asked Mayorkas was, why were there no drones? Mayorkas replied that he didn’t know.
Johnson promised a full investigation.
At what point will we be allowed to believe this was deliberate malice (in the form of not-at-all benign neglect) instead of incompetence?
I started to believe it within 5 minutes of seeing the vid of him crawling on the roof. This was so far beyond stupid that it simply has to be malice.
If you want to see DEI in action, watch the clip of the female SS agents by Trumps vehicle. I wouldn’t let them clean the car let alone guard it and the contents.
I’ve seen a full clip taken from a different angle that shows them from the time Trump walked in from the back to the podium. They were doing what they were supposed to do. Two of them didn’t hesitate to jump onto the podium when he ducked down. Granted, they did look a bit rattled at the car but they did their jobs. There’s a ton of criticism of the one woman who had a hard time blind holstering her pistol (after the danger was over). She should have done what the secret service agent behind Trump did, which was move his coat to the side, look at his holster and guide his pistol in. I do have some experience as a woman holstering a pistol into a kydex concealment holster while wearing body armor, it’s not as easy as when I’m not wearing armor. Men have it a lot easier when it comes to concealing a pistol as my husband finally acknowledged after hearing me bitch about it for years.
I’m just glad that the tiny chicks were notably absent from Trump’s close detail last night. They should be protecting tiny pols like Pelosi and Dukakis (who is truly tiny, I’ve met him several times, nice guy, but very small in stature; I’m 5’6″ and towered over him, it was odd). Women can do the job, but they need to be protecting people they can body block. Little women (and men) cannot body block a strapping 6’3″ charge. That’s it. Put them on some other part of the detail, assign them to tiny men and women, but keep them out of a close detail they cannot hope to do properly because they are too freaking short.
Absolutely right. I thought that as soon as I saw a couple of them including the blond female on stage. Bongino had a great breakdown of what the Secret Service’s job actually is. They are bullet magnets for the protected person. They did that job pretty well immediately jumping on Trump then forming a human shield waving arms around while extracting him/her except for that chick. She did what she was trained to do but is entirely too small to function in that capacity. Trump looking out over her head is proof of that.
Exactly.
It’s really not about height. If that were the main requirement, the Secret Service could just recruit tall men from gyms. There were men on Trump’s detail last night who were shorter than him. The agents are going to protect center mass, first and foremost. Being tall doesn’t save him from a head shot from a trained sniper… but most trained snipers aren’t going to go for a head shot because that’s just incredibly stupid unless the head is the only thing visible. Sniper head shots are generally only found in Hollywood. The guy who shot Trump had minimal training and the shot that clipped his ear was dumb luck. A decent hunter could have easily made that shot.
What a cf! That poor fire chief would still be alive and no one injured.
According to this map, the fire chief was closer to the shooter than Trump, and at a significant angle. The shooter was a total piece of crap.
I’m not sure the bystanders were shot because the shooter couldn’t shoot straight. First of all, he was shot after the first shots, as he covered his family to protect them. Once Trump went down, and the shooter couldn’t target him anymore, it’s possible he simply began firing into the crowd. They might have even been aimed shots that took down the 3 bystanders.
He might not have been trained as well as he should have been, but I don’t think this guy was just some crackpot who didn’t know what he was doing with a rifle.
Uvalde comes to mind
Seems all PO’s , and government security’s are cowards
Simply unbelievable. Given the laughable level of incompetence on display, think about how vulnerable a protectee under this USSS is against an assailant or assailants who aren’t 20-year old psychopaths who live at home and deliver meals to old people. There are a number of nation states, some with very competent black-ops agencies, that would love to see Trump (and Biden, for that matter) dead. All this incident has shown them is how embarrassingly vulnerable US leaders are right now. This is a crisis of the highest order.
After 4 years of Quisling Joe they should be willing to do just about anything to keep him in power.
one of the dei directives is:
pretend to do your job if the cameras are on you or just scream racist at the person questioning you
since trump represents a pro meritocracy
he is the enemy of the dei world
reminds me of the movie serpico
cop to sperico:
its not that a cop will shoot you
its just that they wont be there for you when you need them
Like the 2020 election, it was a stand down. They all did nothing. I’m guessing the recordings of the comms from the overwatch snipers was “hey do I shoot this guy?” Followed by silence.
It appears that Biden and the Dems attempted to Kill Trump by providing inadequate security. If an assassin was successful they could just blame their DEI SS chief while lying about how terrible the assassination was. It would have ensured Biden’’s reelection though.
On the contrary, it would have doomed it, just as Kennedy’s assassination doomed Goldwater, or anyone else the GOP would have put up that year.
Cheatle has thrown the local cops under the bus. Apparently, that cluster of buildings, in direct line of sight of the podium at approx 145 yards, was just too far away to be a concern to the Secret Service. Someone with a lot of training and practice could make a pistol shot from that distance. I made a 200 yard with a freaking Glock 17. Granted, it took me four shots to get on target but I was just messing around, not seriously practicing.
Dang!! I don’t care if it took you 10 shots. That is some really nifty shooting.
I regularly take shots at 200yrds with a 357 Mag and 45lc revolver. Like you I don’t hit every one but I do get on paper. It is not that difficult with a range shot although I’ve never tried a 9mm semi auto. For me that would be blind luck I think. 150yrd and in with a rifle is general sighting in distance for hunting. Any adequate hunter can make that shot.
Even with a rifle that is some easy Iron Sights range there. No need to bother with an optic when the targets that close
And with optics, you’d have to be an incredibly bad shot to miss at that distance with an AR-15.
Yes, it was inside 500 feet, and the assumption should be – in open terrain like that – a 500 foot shot is easy. Their perimeter should have been out around 1,000 feet in terms of controlled entry. Every building or structure of any real height within at least 700 feet should have been totally locked down.
While there were a lot of failures after that, there really should have been no excuse for this guy getting on a building within 500 feet with a rifle. Period.
(And his van was evidently only a few blocks further out. Oy vey.)
Considering the details of the Gretchen Whitmer “kidnapping” plot, I’m wondering if Crooks was a patsy
Assassinating Trump has been their ultimate backup plan. They’ve been hoping a lone nutcase would do it for them so they didn’t actually have to arrange it. And the secret service reports to the president. So was this a lone nutcase or arranged. If arranged of course they would shoot the assassin dead whether he succeeded or not. Dead men tell no tales.
The point of the assassination was to get rid of Trump–but there was more.
It was to get rid of him in a clumsy obvious fashion–to send a message to US that they can kill us with impunity, that they could do it obviously.
They failed at killing Trump. But they’re still trying to get something out of this.
The patsy was eliminated and the fake investigation has been started. More and more examples of how obvious this all was will come out.
And nothing will be done.
Because WE have to understand that they can kill us whenever they want. TRUMP needs to understand that. He needs to understand that the people he’s surrounding himself with, for protection, work for THEM.
It’s called terrorism for a reason.
It really begs the question of how many other openings they left open at other venues prior to this.
Uvalde police are glad someone else is wearing the badge or “worst protectors”
So far as hate on the female agents- meh – It’s about training and being GOOD at what you do. They have their place, but as noted- that place is NOT as human shield for a man as big as a house. Luca Brassi and Refrigerator Perry are the men for the body job, not Tanya Harding.
Whoever came up with the “PAC-MAN shaped security zone” should seek a new career
That Pac-Man graphic was a joke – a very smart joke – from a Twitterer. But, the truth of the matter is even worse. According to who? The Director of the USSS who said in an interview last night….
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”
The people who have allegedly pledged to throw themselves in the literal line of fire find ‘slope roofs’ too dangerous to navigate.
And all while the sniper team you can see behind Trump is on a… sloped roof. Yeah, he can pull my other one now; it’s got bells on it.
Except the sniper team that shot him was on a similar sloped roof. It was a stand down. Benghazi.
Just throwing this out for thought and possible discussion.
We have all, in the last couple of decades, been through or observed events that were . . . momentous and frequently deadly for someone.
And the government has either been involved or investigated them.
What percentage of the time has the government’s story of what happened turned out to be fact? And what percentage of the time have we been lied to routinely and for their own purposes?
Subotai Bahadur