Dramatic new police bodycam footage of Thomas Matthew Crooks firing an AR-15-style rifle at former President Donald J. Trump on a Pennsylvania rooftop shows the handcuffed Crooks’ body falling face-down as a counter-shooter shoots him in the head, sending a river of blood running down the roof and over the edge.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released 25 minutes of new body camera footage, in addition to the three minutes he released last week, obtained by Senate investigators from the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit SWAT team.
The video confirmed the presence of eight shell casings and showed that Crooks had a remote control device with a retractable antenna to detonate the bomb.
The body camera footage begins with SWAT officers jogging behind the stage where Trump had been shot 16 minutes earlier, running toward the American Glass Research building north of the rally venue. A medic, another SWAT officer, and the SWAT officer recording the footage had to crawl through a hole in the chain-link fence to enter the AGR compound.
“If the phone rings, please call me as there may be someone working with you.”
SWAT officers used a ladder that was leaning against the east side of the building to climb to the roof of Building 6. When officers got on the roof at 6:31 p.m., cameras showed an open black Swiss Gear backpack near the north end of the roof. A small brown canvas backpack was visible about halfway up the roof where Crooks’ body lay.
The medic knelt down to check Crooks’s carotid pulse. Crooks’ body was face down and had been handcuffed by the first officers on the scene. His head wound was fatal, as evidenced by the large amount of blood running down the roof.
Crooks’ rifle was located approximately six feet to his left and responding officers presumably removed it to that location and then handcuffed Crooks.
Steve Friend, a former FBI special agent and SWAT team member, said handcuffing an offender and seizing their weapon is a natural course of action for the first officer on the scene. “It’s standard procedure to ensure officer safety,” Friend told The Blaze News.
“Watch out for shell casings,” a voice from off-camera can be heard saying to a SWAT officer seen on body camera footage.
A sergeant from the Allegheny County bomb squad searched Crooks’ pockets. He found a cell phone, a rangefinder and a gray walkie-talkie next to him. One officer took a photo with his cell phone and sent it to other bomb squad members.
“If the phone rings, please call me as there may be someone working with you,” the Allegheny sergeant said. “I want to keep the phone safe, but it has 10 percent battery left.” The sergeant said the phone would be placed in a Faraday bag to prevent it from setting off any explosives that Crooks might have set off nearby.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on July 24, FBI Director Christopher Wray said analysts do not believe a remote control set off two explosive devices found in Crooks’ vehicle.
“It is difficult to understand why the USSS rejected the proposed use of drones.”
A Secret Service agent who came onto the roof around 7 p.m. asked about shell casings he had seen on the roof. “At least eight,” Bieber’s SWAT officer responded.
Police drone provision
In other developments in the assassination attempt, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said that, according to a whistleblower, the US Secret Service has “repeatedly” rejected offers from local law enforcement to provide drone technology to secure venues for Trump rallies.
“This means that the technology was available to the USSS and could have been deployed to secure the location,” Hawley said in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “The Secret Service said no.”
Hawley said it was only after the shooting that the Secret Service changed its mind and “asked our local partners to deploy drone technology to monitor the scene in the aftermath of the attack.”
“We are at a loss as to why the USSS refused to use their drone when it was offered to them, especially given the fact that the USSS authorized the shooter to fly his own drone just hours before the rally. [the] event,”
Hawley wrote.
Wray testified that Crooks had been flying his small drone for about 11 minutes from 3:50 p.m., about 200 yards from the stage at the rally. Trump was shot just after 6:11 p.m.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators wrote letters to three federal agencies and five state and local law enforcement agencies seeking records related to the rally and the assassination attempt.
“Senators are seeking information about security preparations, intelligence gathering about the potential for violence ahead of the attack, and a detailed account of the authorities’ security response,” Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in a statement.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee earlier announced its own bipartisan investigation, joining the House investigation and investigations by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and the FBI.
During roughly five hours of testimony before the House of Representatives on July 24, Wray appeared to question whether Trump was hit by an actual bullet or shrapnel, though he did not explain why he made that assertion.
Wray’s comments drew condemnation from Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), the former president’s physician who has treated Trump since the shooting.
“I served as an emergency physician in the U.S. Navy for over 20 years, including as a combat medic on the battlefield in Iraq, and have treated numerous gunshot wounds during my career,” Jackson wrote in a July 26 letter to “Concerned Citizens of the United States.”
“There is absolutely no evidence that it was anything other than a gunshot wound,” Jackson wrote. “Congress should correct the record, as the hospital and I have confirmed. It is wrong and inappropriate for Director Ray to suggest otherwise.”
On Friday afternoon, the F.B.I. statement “The bullet that struck President Trump in the ear was either a bullet or fragments fired from the deceased individual’s rifle,” the agency said in a statement.
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