On the surface, the assassination attempt on President Trump and the murder of an innocent bystander in Butler, Pa., resulted from a tragic lapse of security at the very moment a deranged young man decided to make his move. But to the local residents who were there, the official explanation just doesn’t add up.
The South Shore Press returned to the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds to ask locals about their view of the events that shocked the nation.
Among the rolling farmland north of Pittsburgh, the public remains unyielding in its suspicion. “I don’t trust the government; they’re lying about everything on this,” said Ken Weaver, a lifelong Butler resident. “How in the world can someone get this close to the President of the United States with a rifle and a ladder and no one stops him? He may be a lone shooter but he did have help. We’re still waiting for the details on how this happened and who else was involved.”
Eyewitness Dan McRuitt stood just left of the stage when the shots were fired. “You could hear the bullets zipping over our heads.” His friend, firefighter Corey Comperatore, was killed shielding his family from the gunfire. Months later, McRuitt remains skeptical. “The whole thing’s fishy. 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.”
Alvin Vogel, a longtime board member of the Butler Farm Show, had a premonition that something bad was going to happen based on his interaction with federal agents in the weeks before the shooting. “The way the guys were running around, chickens with their heads cut off, they didn’t know what they were doing,” he said. “I told my wife, ‘There’s going to be trouble up there.’”
When the shooting started, Vogel said warnings were ignored. “Everybody was hollering, ‘Guy on the roof, guy’s got a gun,’” he recalled. “But the sniper had him in his sights and the woman from the FBI said, ‘Don’t do a thing.’ Then when the president was hit, they said, ‘Okay, shoot him.’”
Vogel also questioned the speed of the shooter’s cremation. “His parents didn’t even get a chance to have anything for him,” he said. “That’s the reason I think there were other people involved.”
In the shooter’s hometown of Bethel Park, neighbors painted a picture of a family that kept to itself. “I did not know anything about them or who they even were. I couldn’t have recognized them,” said Forrest Works, who lived across the street for nearly a decade. “They kept to themselves. The dad mowing his lawn is the only thing that I’ve ever seen of who lives in the house.”
Another neighbor, who declined to give his name, blames the radicalization of the young man on forces aligned against Donald Trump. “There are powers that be that don’t want what the President is doing. He’s a disruptor, and they’ll do anything to stop him. They got to this kid through the internet and influenced him; they motivated him to try and kill the President. This is where the investigation should be focused. We need answers on this.”
For many in the region, grief for Comperatore—described by friends as a man of faith and courage—still runs deep. Buffalo Township Supervisor Gary Risch remembered him as “an excellent man, great father, great to his wife, great to his kids—just a super guy.” He added, “On a scale of one to 10, as far as being a good person and good for the community, he’s definitely a 10.”
At the Lernerville Speedway, where Comperatore coordinated emergency crews for the races, friend Jessica Mohrbacher was devastated by his loss. “He was a very special person, both him and his whole family,” she said, noting that the speedway was packed during a special ceremony in his honor. “They have a statue of him at the firehouse,” she pointed out. “He is sorely missed by everyone.”
More than a year later, Butler remains haunted by that summer afternoon. The fairgrounds have locked gates to keep out the many out-of-town visitors attracted to the deadly scene. “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.”