Morgantown man shares experience witnessing near-assassination of former President Trump

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WBOY) — As federal officials continue their investigation into why Thomas Crooks opened fire at former President Donald Trump at Saturday’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. 12 News spoke with Pennsylvania native Richard Rosner—who now lives in Morgantown—about his experience attending the event.

Q: “Tell me a little bit about why you decided to go to former President Donald Trump’s Campaign rally.”

A: “So, it was my dad’s 78th birthday. He always wanted to go to a rally, so we decided to go to one in Butler and have a great time.”

Q: “Things took a turn. Tell me about that experience and tell me about what you were feeling in that moment.”

A: “I’ll tell you what, there was 15,000 people there. We had a great time all day, it was like 90 degrees weather and then around 6:00, music was coming on, Trump was getting ready to come out. We saw the snipers on the building and we actually saw them doing a lot of activity and my dad says ‘something’s going on around here’ and I was like ‘oh boy what’s going to happen here?’ And then Trump came on, talked for about, I want to say about five minutes and he put something up on the projector, turned around and before you know we heard gunshots. What did I feel like? Oh my goodness everybody hit the ground. Some people stood because they were shocked and they were just looking at Trump and saying oh my goodness he got hit. Meanwhile, everybody else was hitting the ground. If you heard the crowd, they were saying what are we going to do now. So, the next step was the cops came in and said everybody just run, just run try to get to safety, get to the cars whatever they have to do. What the wild thing was, in your wildest dreams they were saying ‘U-S-A, U-S-A’ while they were running to their car. When you hear the gunshots and you are on the ground and you don’t know where they’re coming from that’s the scary part and then my mom was in front of me, my dad was behind me and you’re trying to protect them and you’re just a lot of things are going through your head.”

Q: “You started your day; you didn’t think anything was going to happen. You were going to go watch the rally, have a nice family day and then something like this happens. Right in that moment what was going through your head?”

A: “My thought was ‘am I going to survive?’ I kind of thought of the other things that happened a couple years ago with concerts and stuff like that and I was thinking ‘this is happening to me, this is not real I am in a movie.’ It’s just the flash that goes in front of you that this could be it and you have your family in front of you. Your mom is like get down, get down and you hear the gunshots. That is probably one of the most surreal things that I’ve ever experienced in my life. Everyone else just screaming and yelling because we have no clue where the gunman was.”

Q: “You stated it was a surreal experience for you, do you regret going?”

A: “Not at all. You know what, it’s one of those things where I don’t like to talk about politics much, but my dad wanted to go for his 78th birthday. It’s part of history now, a part of history that we really don’t want to talk about. But you know what? It was one of the best times to meet people and just congregate and fellowship and unfortunately to have something like that happen, hopefully, in the future we can all unite and be together again. I think that this is going to bring us together, it’s unfortunate about the one gentleman who passed away, but all I can say at the end of the day is you know we had fun with it, and we’re going to survive and I think the one thing I will say is it took us four hours to get home, but everyone was embracing each other and saying they loved each other. That’s the one thing I saw out of 15,000 people there was not one bad word, everybody just loved each other at the end.”

Q: “On that four-hour drive home, what were those conversations like?”

A: “We had the phone on, we had all kinds of different news reporters out there about what’s going on. We wanted to check and see that he was okay, President Trump. A lot of things, the shooter. Did they get him? Some people said they didn’t and that he was still roaming around. We didn’t know, so it was very eerie on the way home. I will say one thing, driving home I have never seen so many police cars, unmarked coming down the road, on the interstate. It was like non-stop one car after the other. A very eerie feeling.”

Q: “Where were you? How close were you guys to the podium?”

A: “We were about I would say about a hundred yards on the right. […] So, when he leaned over and, or he slouched over, that was our side. So what was scary was the gunman could have focused right on us and zoomed us. He was, we were right on the angle there, which was scary. They didn’t show this on TV, but the speakers kind of blew up and we saw this big yellow dust after the shots and we didn’t know if it was a smoke bomb or what was going on.”

Q: “Before [Trump] showed up, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

A: “No, it was an ordinary day. It was a sunny hot, everybody was laughing, joking and you know just congregating. I think about 5:45 is when you noticed the snipers, there was four snipers on two different buildings. The one group of snipers nothing, no activity at all. They were just looking through their binoculars going back and forth. The other ones had their guns up and down, back and forth at about 6:02. My brother and my dad said ‘somethings going on over there, its not normal.’ I mean they were squatting down like they were going to deer hunt and at that time apparently, they had the gunman in their sights. It was kind of an eerie feeling, we knew something was going to happen, this is not normal for a sniper to be this active on the roof.”

Q: “When you saw the snipers did it draw your attention to the building?”

A: “100%. When we saw the snipers, me and my dad, Trump was speaking, and we were staring at the snipers the whole time and people I was talking to said the same thing. All we kept staring at were the snipers and then you hear the shots and you’re like ‘boom’ and then you see the snipers, you just see the guns go off and that’s when they took the gunman out.”

Q: “Was your attention drawn to the building which the gunman was in?”

A: “No, not at all. There was one gentleman I talked to on the way out, and this is a true story, that he actually told a police officer that he had actually seen someone on the building and the police officer said ‘what are you talking about?’ And he couldn’t get his attention anymore. There were four of five people saying ‘there’s a guy on that building over there.’

Q: Did you see former President Trump put his fist in the air?

A: I did not personally myself see because I was bundled down, but my dad and my mom stood up and everybody was like he’s putting his fist in the air, we’re talking maybe 5,000 people said he’s got his fist in the air and they’re screaming this and everybody starts saying ‘USA’ right then, even as were running out. They seen that fist and it was like, it was like a security thing, it was like we all felt like ‘okay are we secure now,’ and then they carried him off.”

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