The Beaver County SWAT team, who worked the Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump rally where a shooter attempted to assassinate the former POTUS, spoke publicly on Monday to offer their firsthand accounts of the event.
‘Something that we’ll always carry with us’
Local SWAT sniper Gregory Nicol spotted a man skulking around the outskirts of the site from his second-floor post inside the AGR complex at the fairgrounds.
The young man in a gray t-shirt was described as lurking around. “He was looking up and down the building … It just seemed out of place,” Nicol said. He was the first to issue a warning about Thomas Crooks, an hour before the shooting took place.
Nicol noticed an unattended bike and backpack. And he saw the man looking up and around, then pulling a rangefinder from his pocket. There was no apparent reason to have a distance-gauging device at a political rally featuring the man who, in a few days, would accept his party’s presidential nomination. The sharpshooter snapped pictures of the suspicious-looking man and the bike, then flagged it to fellow snipers from his team assigned to the event and called it into the command group.
Team members said that the day of the rally, they had no contact with the agents on Trump’s Secret Service detail.
“We were supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service members whenever they arrived, and that never happened,” said Jason Woods, team leader for Beaver County’s Emergency Services Unit and SWAT sniper section.