The audio accompanying this piece was produced by Susan Scott Peterson.
The 90-degree heat was already bearing down on me at noon in the parking lot across the street from the Butler Farm Show grounds. The last time I parked here, I watched a cow lick corn out of my then 2-year-old son’s hand. This time, I was here to work.
The first person I interviewed had parked her car next to mine and told me this was going to be her second rally for Donald Trump. Her first was on Jan. 6, 2021.
She didn’t realize that her first Trump rally had ended in political violence until later.
“We started hearing that there was some kind of kerfuffle inside and that a woman had got shot,” she said. “I was driving home before I found out people had even gone in the building.”
This rally seemed to be a far cry from that. Trump’s supporters were unusually happy. I’ve been to Trump rallies where they have seemed almost angry at me, as a member of the media, for trying to talk to them. But I didn’t get any of that response this time. Nearly every single person I asked was willing to talk with me. The Democratic Party was in disarray that day with worry about President Joe Biden’s age — and the Trump supporters were almost giddy. A father and son were attending their first Trump rally because they worried it would be their last chance — Trump’s last time campaigning in the area.
I didn’t, strictly speaking, need to be at this Donald Trump rally on July 13.
Plus — my application for a media credential wasn’t approved by the Trump campaign. My editor had emailed to ask why — we are one of the biggest local outlets in the region, and we aren’t typically denied. We didn’t get a response.
So our plan was for me to stay outside the Butler County Farm Show grounds and interview Trump supporters to help our readers and listeners feel what it was like to be there. My editor was going to watch it from a livestream and write it all up. The Associated Press would take more photos.
But I wanted to be there. Not because it would be fun. There wasn’t enough water at the rally to compensate for how hot it was. I tried to check in at the media table, and eventually after waiting about 20 minutes while they verified my identity, they let me in.
I sent my editors a message explaining that I would head home as soon as the former president’s speech was over:
“I am just sticking around to get some good audio, a couple photos and in case anything crazy happens.”
‘Gunshots’
I have covered a handful of events with presidents and vice presidents. Typically, I have to drop off my equipment five hours in advance with the U.S. Secret Service and their dogs to ensure they are safe before I am admitted later.
So it struck me then that the Secret Service was checking my bag on the spot as I walked through the metal detector. I have a special bag for my gear, and they didn’t know how to open it correctly, so I showed them. They made me turn on my camera to ensure it was real.
“That’s a nice bag,” the Secret Service officer said to me.
I walked into the tent where the people running the soundboard were working. There was good shade inside, and a reporter for the Butler Eagle newspaper had pulled up a chair.
“That would be the worst job, don’t you think,” I said to him, pointing to the Secret Service snipers on the roof. “They’re all in black, and they’re just lying there — no water.”
The mood in the crowd didn’t really liven up until Trump’s caravan finally arrived. Earlier, a giant flag behind the stage had become tangled up — but now it was ready for the big speech, as “God Bless the USA,” blared over the monitors and the crowd broke into cheers of, “USA! USA! USA!”
I had just jumped off the stairs of the media riser, where I had been taking photos of Trump, when shots rang out.
I had spent the previous summer covering the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter’s trial and had heard those sounds before in recordings played in the courtroom. Although I knew it was possible the sounds were something else, I felt scared.
I grabbed my camera and jumped under a large metal tractor lift. For about 10 seconds, I just laid there on my stomach.
The only mass shooting that seemed to fit the bill in my subconscious was the one in Las Vegas in 2017 at the start of Trump’s first term. That’s the only one where there was a crowd comparatively this big. And I knew that the shooter in Vegas didn’t stop — he kept shooting. The idea that this was an assassination attempt hadn’t yet occurred to me. Under the tractor felt like one of the few places I would have some protection.
And then I remembered why I was there. I messaged my editors, “Gunshots.”
And I started taking photos of the crowd as they took cover.
Chaos at the fairgrounds
When I finally got out from under the tractor, about a dozen or so men were shouting at us in the media pen for what had happened. One of them even claimed that a reporter in the rafters had been smiling or laughing.
People streamed by me, and I overheard a man shout, "You wanted political violence? You got it!"
A woman passing by said, "They better kill the person that killed our president."
I started interviewing whoever was willing to talk about what had happened. The differing accounts didn’t all add up, but I started to get the sense that maybe the bullets hadn’t come from anyone inside.
Later I would learn, along with the rest of the world, that there were three other victims and that Trump had been shot in the ear. But in the moment, the accounts were contradictory and confusing: some of the people I saw said they saw two people being carried away, at least one of them seriously injured.
And they said Trump’s ear was bloody, although his supporters weren’t sure if he’d been shot or it had been hit by glass or if he’d hurt his ear when the Secret Service tackled him.
I pointed my microphone at yet another man, and when he hesitated to speak with me, I began to tear up. "This is my job. This is how I make a living. If you don’t talk to me, I just have to go try and talk to the next guy.”
I was trying to say: I just went through this thing with you. But unlike you, I don’t have a choice about how I respond to this. My job requires that I don’t spend this time mourning or processing or angry — my job is to keep gathering information, to bear witness to what is happening, for the sake of the many millions of people not there who needed to know.
As we were being pushed outside a fenced perimeter, I stopped for a moment to take a picture of empty plastic bottles strewn across the grass, chairs toppled over, the giant American flag dangling limply. I felt a great sadness for our country.
Searching for the shooter
I’d slept only a few hours on Sunday morning before my kids woke me up, so I started my day early with a large iced coffee at a McDonald’s in Bethel Park. I asked the cashier if he knew anyone who had attended Bethel Park High School. Ryan Culhane, one of the workers there, said he was a student but didn’t know anything about Thomas Crooks, who the FBI had identified as the shooter only hours earlier.
The most pressing question — the one that seemed like it had the potential to shape the events in the coming days more than any other — was who could have done this? And the answer to that question had potential repercussions that were hard to even fathom.
During the next couple of days, I would ask literally hundreds of people some form of that same question. At the mall. At the local ice rink and the local gym. To a family playing tennis. At a lady who was driving past me in a parking lot and happened to make eye contact. I bumped into a Bethel Park teacher whose husband told me she would be fired if she spoke to the media.
I walked around Crooks’ neighborhood and knocked on doors. I stopped at churches, which on a Sunday morning seemed like one of the best bets to find people who knew him. They didn’t know him or his family.
But it wasn’t until I was about to regroup with two colleagues at a popular local dining spot, when I asked the server that same question — did you know anyone at Bethel Park High School?
One of the servers’ sisters did. A few minutes later, she slipped me a ripped piece of paper with her sister’s name and phone number. I jumped back into my car to call her in private. She, like almost everyone who the media interviewed during the next few days, said she didn’t know Crooks well.
But from what she could tell he wasn’t a liberal ideologue. She said she was pretty sure he and his small group of friends were conservative.
“I would almost put money on the fact that I probably had seen him wear a Trump shirt,” she said. “Which is why this is so shocking to me.”
Still unknown
After several days of trying to understand who Crooks was in life, there are still large holes in the portrait.
I looked at yearbook photos. I walked around the engineering classrooms at a local college he attended and stopped by the gun range where he shot. I went through every media account I could find to get a better sense of which stories about him were the most credible.
We don’t know much of anything from the people who knew him the best, including his family and friends. The FBI presumably has interviewed most of them but hasn’t yet shared anything about his motive.
James Densley, one of the country’s leading experts on mass shooters, told me that it wouldn't be unusual if the picture of Crooks that emerges is more like a mass shooter than someone who sought to change the political trajectory of our country.
His research suggests that most political assassins in recent history have a similar psychological profile to that of mass shooters. And in fact, he said, experts studied political assassins in the 1960s long before they ever studied mass shooters.
“What we saw is that they tended to be men. They tended to be in their 20s, and many of them were dealing with their own sort of personal issues that were beyond any political or ideological motivations for the crime,” he said. “And so you could say that actually, it's the mass shooters that are fitting the profile [of an assassin] rather than the other way round.”
It is, for the time being, the best explanation I’ve heard at the end of a long week of trying to understand just what had happened — and why.
