(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Butler Township Police Department has released body cam footage from the officer who confronted Thomas Crooks seconds before he opened fire on Donald Trump and his supporters at the July 13 campaign event in Pennsylvania.
The footage corroborates testimony from Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Christopher L. Paris that a local cop climbed onto the rooftop and attempted to stop Crooks, but jumped back down when Crooks pointed his AR-15 rifle at him.
Paris initially said this happened “minutes” before the assassination attempt, but later changed his testimony to say “seconds.” The footage, which shows the officer climbing about 20 seconds before Crooks opened fire at 6:11 p.m., appears to support the latter account.
The video below shows PSP Commish Paris saying it was "minutes" between when snipers climbed building and saw Crooks, and when Crooks shot
The committee then went to a break, and Paris came back and changed his story. Very interesting. I wonder who told him to change his story? https://t.co/yIQW5IlC4a pic.twitter.com/da89Sb4Uz4— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) July 27, 2024
“Fu– this close, bro. Dude, he turned around on me,” the officer later told his colleagues after the shooting stopped.
“Before you motherf—–s came up here, I popped my head up there like an idiot by myself dude,” the officer who was boosted onto the roof, was heard saying.
“Then he turned around and I f—— dropped and I started f—— I was calling out bro, f—— on top of the roof. F—— we’re not on the same frequency?”
The audio from the body cam footage doesn’t have audio during the shooting. The audio only starts nearly 2 minutes in, when the officer is getting his own rifle out of his police vehicle. The officer later climbed the roof again to examine Crooks’s corpse.
The unnamed officer’s body cam footage was the culmination of a search for Crooks that began by at least 5:38 p.m.—more than 30 minutes before the shooting.
“Kid [lurking] around building we are in. AGR I believe it is. I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him,” a counter sniper texted at 5:38 p.m., attaching two photos of Crooks.
“Call it in to command and have a uniform check it out.”
According to the Washington Post, after initially seeing him at 5:38 p.m., officers “lost track” of him for about 20 minutes. Then, the same counter sniper again spotted Crooks at 6:02 p.m.—this time on the side of the building facing away from the Trump rally.
Crooks was walking northeast, and the sniper apparently thought he was headed to a Sheetz gas station about a quarter-mile outside the rally site.
“He just went towards the Sheetz,” the sniper reportedly said, sending his colleagues on a wild goose chace while Crooks was presumably already on the roof.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
