Footage capturing the moment a local police officer confronted former President Donald Trump ’s would-be assassin before he opened fire at the July 13 rally was released by police on Thursday.
Lt. Matthew Pearson, the acting chief of the Butler Township Police Department, shared the bodycam footage with the Washington Examiner. The videos show the experiences of several officers who responded before, during, and after the shooting and paint a clearer picture of how Thomas Crooks was able to fire on Trump despite being confronted.
“F***ing this close, bro, he turned around on me,” said the officer who was hoisted up onto the American Glass Research building where Crooks was stationed.
New revelations in the bodycam footage
The footage, of which some of the audio was redacted, shows a police officer running toward the building at 6:10 p.m., just one minute before Trump was shot. Moments later, he was hoisted up by another officer and is shown on video peeking over the roof for a brief moment before Crooks, who cannot be seen at this point, turned his gun on him.
Clinging to the roof and unable to draw his weapon, the officer fell approximately 8 feet down and sprained his ankle. Seconds later, at 6:11, Crooks opened fire. All of the audio from the officer’s body camera before 6:12 was redacted.
After the officer fell from the roof, he can be seen on video sprinting to warn other police officers. He asked, “Who’s got eyes on him?” and helped a team of officers carrying rifles, who were attempting to scale the wrong part of the building, to locate Crooks. He alerted others that the shooter had a “full kit,” long hair, glasses, and a bag and that he was “laying down, prone out” on the roof.
None of the officers on the ground appeared to be aware that Crooks was killed seconds after he fired on Trump and the rallygoers. Minutes after the shooting, an officer who spotted a deceased Crooks on the roof shouted, “Hold, hold, hold, he’s got a f***ing gun.”
Eventually, the officer who confronted Crooks made it to the roof with backup, and the footage shows the shooter dead on the metal roof with a stream of blood that spanned from the peak of the roof’s slope in the middle of the building to the edge.
In other footage, four officers can be seen carrying a body covered in blood to a white tent. The reactions of numerous rallygoers were also captured on video, including several who claimed to have seen the shooter die from counter-sniper fire.
“I seen his head pop off,” one person said. Another chimed in, saying, “He’s dead.”
One rallygoer can be heard questioning how Crooks made it up to the roof unnoticed because “they got snipers on the roof.”
In the footage, officers can be heard speculating about how Crooks scaled the roof of the AGR building. One officer asked about a ladder, while another suggested that he used a wooden plank propped up near a pallet and a plastic shed.
Crooks’s body was found in possession of a “bloodied receipt” for a five-foot ladder, but the FBI does not believe he used it to carry out the attack.
‘Can you imagine’: Local police may have saved Trump’s life
The officer who confronted Crooks and the officer who hoisted him up onto the building may have actually saved Trump’s life by buying him the few seconds he needed to “miraculously” turn his head, according to Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe.
“Can you imagine 10 seconds before that?” Slupe said. “That the president was looking straight ahead and where that bullet could have potentially landed.”
The Butler County Sheriff defended the officer from criticism that he didn’t do more to stop Crooks, who was just 130 yards away from the former president. He framed it as a decision between “I’m dead or I drop” — either way, the officer wasn’t going to be able to stop the shooter.
“When someone points a gun at you and you can’t get to your weapon, you tell them a**holes online that they are Superman,” Slupe said. “Like, ‘I’ll just pull a gun out and they can shoot at me. I don’t give a s***.’ Yeah. Mm-hm. Right, right.”
Crooks went to shooting range one day before rally: New report
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who was the first to release bodycam footage to the public on July 25, released 46 pages of documents about Crooks’s membership at the Clairton Sportsmen's Club, a local gun club.
Grassley’s report, which his staff shared with the Washington Examiner, shows that Crooks established membership at the club on Aug. 10, 2023, less than a year before the attempted assassination. He visited the range 43 times and signed in for target practice 20 times in his first four months of membership. In 2024, he attended target practice approximately once a week on average.
Crooks’s final visit to the shooting range was at 2:45 p.m. on July 12, just one day before he opened fire on Trump using a DPMS AR-15 rifle that his father purchased.
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While records show Crooks practiced on the rifle range more frequently than the pistol range, spending about 80% of his time at the gun club practicing his rifle shooting, he focused almost exclusively on the rifle range in 2024.
The report additionally reveals that Crooks has spent some holidays at the range, including Christmas Day, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween, and that Clairton Sportsmen's Club was used by Department of Homeland Security officers for “police training” on May 23.
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