The photographer who took the “one in a million” image of a bullet grazing the side of Donald Trump’s head was using a camera shooting 30 frames per second when gunfire erupted at the former president’s rally in Pennsylvania.
New York Times photojournalist Doug Mills said Monday he didn’t realize he’d taken a historic photograph during the assassination attempt on President Trump until his editors reviewed the trajectory of a bullet fired by sniper Matthew Thomas Crooks from a nearby rooftop on Saturday evening.
President Trump was grazed in the right ear and three others were shot, including a 50-year-old volunteer firefighter who died.
Crooks was shot and killed by police.
“I thought, he grimaced, turned to his right, grabbed his ear and looked at it, and he collapsed,” Mills recalled. From CBS News. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, he got shot.’
Pulitzer Prize winner Mills continued taking photos even after Trump was escorted off the stage by Secret Service agents.
“So when it happened, even though the former president’s staff was yelling at me to get down, get down, and the Secret Service was yelling at us to get down, I probably didn’t do the safest thing, but I ran around to the side of the stage to try and capture the moment,” he told CBS News.
Mills initially sent back photos from the aftermath of the riot, including one of Trump pumping his fist at the crowd with blood coming from his ear, before remembering he had photos of Trump speaking before the riot.
“She texted me and called me and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but I think I have pictures. I have pictures with a bullet in the back of his head,'” he said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God.'”
The stripes are barely visible unless you enlarge the photo.
According to CBS News, an FBI forensic expert confirmed that the image shows a bullet cutting through the air, though it’s unclear if that’s the bullet that pierced Trump’s ear.
Retired FBI Special Agent Michael Harrigan He told the Times It’s possible, though unlikely, that Mills took a photograph of the bullet.
Mills was using a camera capable of shooting up to 30 frames per second, and he reportedly captured the bullets at an incredibly fast shutter speed of 1/8,000 of a second.
“Most of the cameras that capture bullets in flight use special cameras that are so fast they’re not used in normal photography, so capturing a bullet in a horizontal position like in the photo is a one in a million chance, making it nearly impossible to capture even if you knew the bullet was coming,” Harrigan told the Times.
“Given the circumstances, if this isn’t indicative of the bullet’s trajectory in the air, I don’t know what else is,” he added.
