MILWAUKEE — How was Thomas Matthew Crooks able to shoot Donald Trump at the former president’s Butler rally Saturday? U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., wants to know.
The local congressman was sitting in the front row of the rally when suddenly a series of shots rang out. Trump was grazed while one attendee was killed and two others seriously injured.
The Butler congressman told the Post-Gazette in an interview Sunday that he wanted to know if the shooter took advantage of a hole in security.
“You have to question what we didn’t do right?” Mr. Kelly said as he prepared to head here for the Republican National Convention. “Did we have enough manpower? Did we have enough surveillance? Why didn’t we see this guy?”
Mr. Kelly offered nothing but praise for law enforcement while asking the Secret Service and FBI to look at what happened and report to Congress. Until then, he didn’t want anyone to speculate.
“I don’t want people jumping to a conclusion,” Mr. Kelly said. “We want to wait and see what happened. A lot of questions to be asked.”
In the interview, Mr. Kelly recounted what happened when he first heard the gunshots.
“It was so surrealistic,” he said. “It was like this was a bad movie. I said, ‘My God, the president’s been shot. To watch all that in real time was like it was in slow motion, but it wasn’t in slow motion.”
As the shots rang out, Mr. Kelly said, “it was a blend of things: people crying, people screaming, people shouting, ‘USA.’”
He said he saw the others who were shot laying on the ground. “The sad part about it was the people who came to see him and they were on the ground. They were hurt,” he said.
Mr. Kelly said he also worried about his family, who were elsewhere at the rally. He tried to find them among the thousands of attendees. He said he finally was able to track them down at his brother’s home, which was near the Butler Farm Show.
A day later, he said he wondered how things could have turned out.
“What I’m thinking more than anything else was that if the president didn’t turn his head slightly, that bullet, instead of it going through his right ear, it would be going through his brain and we’d be talking about the assassination of former President Trump. I don’t think we’d be calm today and we’d be talking the way we are.”
“Things have to change,” he said.
Jonathan D. Salant: jsalant@post-gazette.com, @JDSalant
First Published: July 15, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: July 15, 2024, 6:28 p.m.
