Eyewitness Dan McRuitt says he’ll never forget the day shots rang out above him at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa.—or the questions that still haunt him about what really happened.
McRuitt, owner of a meat packing business in the nearby town of Cabot, attended the event with his son and stood just left of the stage when gunfire erupted from a rooftop behind them. “We knew exactly what it was,” he said. “We shoot all the time. You could hear the bullets zipping over our heads and right into where Trump was at.”
McRuitt’s friend, firefighter Corey Comperatore, was killed in the attack, and several others were injured. But in the months since, McRuitt says government agencies have offered “only part of the truth.”
“The whole thing’s fishy,” he said. “There’s just little things that don’t add up. I just don’t see how all that could play out without some other support.”
McRuitt said locals who know the Butler Farm Show grounds, where the shooting occurred, find it implausible that a young man could climb onto a nearby rooftop with a ladder and a rifle unnoticed. “You carry a ladder around and not be noticed?” he said. “There were thousands of people there. It’s not like you’re holding your beer and a bag of cookies.”
He also questioned how quickly the shooter’s body was cremated and why Pennsylvania’s governor arrived at the scene so rapidly. “It was like, boom, he’s already there. How’s that work?” McRuitt asked. “Did he not know something ahead of time?”
He believes an independent investigation is needed. “It needs to be looked at by people with no political ambitions,” McRuitt concluded. “Fresh eyes, different minds, because we’re not getting the whole story. The government needs to tell the public the entire truth.”