Donald Trump Shot: Shooter, Investigations, and Reforms

Former President Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire from a nearby rooftop, striking Trump in the upper right ear, killing one attendee, and wounding two others before Secret Service counter-snipers killed him. It was the most serious attack on a U.S. president or presidential candidate since the 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan, and it exposed a chain of security failures that later investigations called preventable.

What Happened at the Rally

Trump was speaking at the Butler Farm Show grounds when the first shots came at approximately 6:11 p.m. local time. The gunfire came from the roof of a building belonging to American Glass Research, a manufacturing facility adjacent to the rally site. A bullet, “whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces,” struck Trump’s upper right ear, according to the FBI.¹

His physician, former White House doctor Ronny Jackson, described the injury as a two-centimeter-wide gunshot wound with significant bleeding and swelling. Trump was taken to Butler Memorial Hospital, received a CT scan, and was released the same night. No sutures were required because of the broad nature of the wound, though intermittent bleeding continued for days.²

Three rally attendees were also hit. Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former fire chief from Sarver, Pennsylvania, was killed. His wife said he died shielding his family.³ David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, was shot in the stomach. James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, was shot twice, sustaining injuries to his abdomen, spine, and left arm that required emergency surgery.⁴ Both survived. In June 2026, Dutch, Copenhaver, and their wives filed federal lawsuits against the United States alleging Secret Service negligence, each seeking at least $150,000 in damages.⁵

Who the Shooter Was

Thomas Matthew Crooks was a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles south of Butler. He had graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022 and earned an associate degree in engineering science with high honors from the Community College of Allegheny County in the summer of 2024. He worked in a nursing home kitchen and lived with his parents, both social workers. He was a registered Republican who had made a single $15 donation to the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue in 2021.⁶⁷

Crooks used an AR-style rifle with a collapsible stock, which he had bought from his father for $500 in the summer of 2023. He belonged to a local sportsmen’s club and had visited a shooting range before the attack. The FBI identified July 6 as the likely start of his operational planning, the day he registered for the rally and searched online for information about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.⁸

Two hours before the rally, Crooks flew a drone about 200 yards from the stage for roughly 11 minutes. FBI Director Christopher Wray described the footage as a “rear-view mirror” of the scene behind his planned firing position. Two crude improvised explosive devices with receivers were recovered from the trunk of his car, along with a transmitter found on his body. The FBI said the bombs were viable, but the receivers were switched off, so he could not have detonated them remotely.⁸

Despite exhaustive searches of his home, phone, and online activity, investigators never identified a clear ideology or motive. Crooks had searched his phone for symptoms of major depressive disorder and showed signs of psychological distress. He left no manifesto.⁹ The FBI formally concluded its investigation the week of November 22, 2025, determining that Crooks “acted alone and without motive.”¹⁰

How He Reached the Roof

Crooks was flagged as suspicious more than an hour before the shooting but was never stopped. A local counter-sniper first noticed him at 4:26 p.m., sitting at a picnic table near the officers’ staging area and parked alongside their cars. By 5:10 p.m., local officers had designated him a “person of interest” after spotting him with a rangefinder and a backpack, and they took and shared photos.¹¹¹²

Between 5:30 and 5:45 p.m., Crooks was spotted again with the rangefinder. Information reached the Secret Service security room, where an agent failed to relay it to the protective detail guarding Trump.¹³ Secret Service snipers spotted Crooks on the AGR building roof at 5:52 p.m. Trump took the stage around 6:02 p.m., and rally-goers began pointing at the man on the roof and trying to alert police.¹²

Shortly before 6:11 p.m., a local police officer was hoisted onto the roof and came face-to-face with Crooks. Crooks pointed the rifle at him, and the officer dropped back to the ground to avoid being shot.¹⁴ Crooks then fired eight rounds toward the stage. Counter-snipers acquired the target within 11 seconds and killed him 26 seconds after his first shot.¹²

A central factor was confusion over who was responsible for securing the AGR building. It sat outside the Secret Service’s inner perimeter but within line of sight of the stage. Local law enforcement used it as a staging area, and counter-sniper teams hesitated when they saw a figure on the roof, uncertain whether it was an officer or a threat. The Secret Service had requested a local police cruiser be stationed at the building. It was never provided.¹²

What Investigators Found

Three major reviews examined the security failures at Butler: a DHS-commissioned independent panel, a bipartisan House Task Force, and a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee investigation led by Chairman Rand Paul. All three reached similar conclusions.

The DHS Independent Panel

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas appointed a four-member panel on July 21, 2024, led by former Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip and including former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, former White House counterterrorism adviser Frances Townsend, and veteran law enforcement executive David Mitchell. The panel released its report on October 17, 2024, calling the Secret Service “bureaucratic, complacent, and static” with “deep flaws” that were “systemic or cultural.” Without fundamental reform, it warned, “another Butler can and will happen again.”¹⁵

The panel identified a series of specific failures: no personnel were assigned to secure the AGR building; line-of-sight threats were not mitigated; communications between the Secret Service security room and local law enforcement operated through a split structure that prevented real-time information sharing; and the counter-unmanned aerial system was inoperable during a critical window. The panel recommended bringing in leadership from outside the agency, mandating overhead surveillance technology at all outdoor events, and creating physically integrated communications systems with local partners.¹⁵

The House Task Force

The bipartisan House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump issued its final report on December 10, 2024. The task force concluded the attack was “preventable” and issued 11 recommendations, including prioritizing protective experience in agent assignments, providing more robust training for non-Secret Service personnel at events, and reviewing the agency’s budget, staffing, and retention practices.¹⁶

The Senate Investigation

The Senate committee’s report, released on the one-year anniversary in July 2025, focused on individual accountability. It found that the Secret Service security room agent, the Special Agent in Charge of the Buffalo field office, failed to relay information about the suspicious individual to the agents protecting Trump, even after learning at 5:45 p.m. that a man with a rangefinder had been spotted. That agent admitted he was unaware of a separate Butler County command post until the afternoon of the rally and had never directly communicated with local law enforcement that day. He retired on June 28, 2025, without being fired. An internal Secret Service review found he had not violated agency policy.¹⁷

The report also documented that Secret Service headquarters denied or left unfulfilled at least 10 requests from Trump’s protective detail for additional resources, including counter-sniper personnel, and assigned an inexperienced operator to manage drone countermeasures.¹⁸

Accountability and Reforms

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on July 23, 2024, one day after a contentious House Oversight Committee hearing in which she faced bipartisan calls to step down. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she took “full responsibility for the security lapse.” House Oversight Chairman James Comer and Ranking Member Jamie Raskin had jointly demanded her departure.¹⁹ Deputy Director Ronald Rowe, a 24-year agency veteran, was appointed acting director.²⁰ The Senate report later stated that Cheatle had “falsely testified to Congress that no USSS asset requests were denied for the Butler rally.”¹³

Six Secret Service employees received suspensions without pay ranging from 10 to 42 days and were placed on restricted or non-operational duty. Their identities were not publicly released, but the Senate report detailed the individual penalties: the site agent received suspensions totaling 43 days; the site counterpart, the Special Agent in Charge of the Pittsburgh office, and the Pittsburgh lead agent each received 14-day suspensions; a Uniformed Division team leader received 35 days; and an assistant to the Special Agent in Charge received 10 days.²¹ The Senate report called these penalties “far too weak,” noting that no one was fired.¹⁸

President Biden signed the Enhanced Presidential Security Act on October 1, 2024, requiring the Secret Service to apply uniform staffing standards for protecting presidents, vice presidents, and major candidates regardless of party or incumbency.²² Senators Chuck Grassley and Catherine Cortez Masto introduced legislation that would require Senate confirmation for future Secret Service directors and impose a 10-year term limit on the position.²³

As of July 2025, the Secret Service reported that it had implemented 21 of the 46 congressional recommendations, with 16 in progress. Changes included updating the Protective Operations Manual to clarify accountability and staffing, creating a new Aviation and Airspace Security division, deploying Mobile Command Vehicles for joint operations with local law enforcement, and establishing formal processes for flagging line-of-sight vulnerabilities.²²

Later Attempts

Butler was not the only attack. Two other incidents targeting Trump or his administration followed, and it’s worth separating them from the July 13 shooting.

On September 15, 2024, Secret Service Special Agent Robert Fercano was patrolling one hole ahead of Trump at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, when he spotted a man in a concealed position along a fence line aiming what appeared to be a rifle. Fercano fired, and the man fled without discharging his weapon. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was apprehended on I-95. Law enforcement recovered a Norinco SKS rifle loaded with 20 rounds, steel armor plates, and a camera mounted on the fence pointed at the sixth green. A federal jury convicted Routh on all five counts in September 2025 after a trial in which he represented himself, and on February 4, 2026, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon sentenced him to life in prison plus seven consecutive years.²⁴²⁵

On April 25, 2026, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, sprinted through a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton and fired a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, striking a Secret Service agent in the chest. The agent survived because he was wearing a ballistic vest. Other agents shot Allen five times before restraining him. A federal grand jury indicted Allen on May 5, 2026, on four counts, including attempting to assassinate the President of the United States.²⁶

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U.S. Department of Justice. Indictment Charges Cole Tomas Allen With Attempt to Assassinate President