A witness to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump revealed he warned Secret Service agents about a man with a rifle on a nearby roof minutes before they opened fire.
The shaken witness, named only as Greg, told the BBC that he saw the suspected gunman climb onto a rooftop outside the event in Butler, Pennsylvania, and was bewildered by the lack of action from agents.
‘I’m thinking to myself ‘Why is Trump still speaking, why have they not pulled him off the stage,” he said. ‘The next thing you know, five shots ring out.’
The gunman was shot dead on a rooftop roughly 400ft from the stage, and the witness said he saw the Secret Service ‘blow his head off.’
Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said he was told by detectives that the gunman ‘would have required a rifle’ to make the shot, as it ‘was several hundred yards’ away from the stage.
Trump said he ‘felt the bullet ripping through (his) skin’ as he was shot in the ear in chaotic scenes at the rally, before he reassured supporters by pumping his fist at the crowd.
The witness described how he saw the secret service climb onto the roof after the shooter had been killed, with images from social media appearing to show a man laying lifeless as cops surround him.
Immediately after the shooting, the Trump supporter told the BBC how he saw the shooter prepare to assassinate the former president, and said rally attendees saw him on the roof for three or four minutes with no action.
He said: ‘We noticed a guy crawling, you know army, bear crawling up the roof of the building 50ft away from us.
‘So we are standing there pointing at the guy crawling up the roof, he had a rifle, we could clearly see he had a rifle.
‘We are pointing at him, the police are down there running around on the ground. We are like hey man there is guy on the roof with a rifle – and the police are like “hey what? you know”, they didn’t know what was going on.
‘We are like we can see him right here on the roof he’s crawling. The next thing you know, I am like why is Trump still speaking? Why have they not pulled him off the stage?
‘I’m standing there pointing at him for two-three minutes, the secret service is looking at us from the top of the barn – I’m pointing at that roof.
