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Police Off The Cuff/Real Crime Stories

FBI Deputy Director discusses how Crooks got AR-15 onto the roof

Police Off The Cuff/Real Crime Stories

Bill Cannon Police off the Cuff/Real Crime Stories

Law Enforcement, Crime, True Crime, Military

4.4870 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Details are beginning to emerge about how the 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to get close enough to Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday to shoot the former United States president in the ear. Evading Secret Service agents and local law enforcement officers, Crooks reached a rooftop about 140 metres (450ft) from where Trump was speaking on a stage and fired, grazing the Republican candidate running in the presidential election in November. Crooks was shot dead by the Secret Service immediately after firing, and an investigation into the incident is ongoing. In the days since the shooting, digital “bread crumbs” have been gathered via media outlets, photographers at the rally and personal cellphone videos depicting the events leading up to the shooting.

Transcript

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0:00.0

In the one question of looking backward to the event on the 13th Director of Bate, can you just talk a little bit about how did Mr. Crooks, how was he able to get an AR-15 onto the roof of that building?

0:20.0

Does your investigation illuminate anything that we have learned

0:25.9

to help to make that point more clear? This question is directed to Paul Abadi, who is the

0:33.4

second in charge at the FBI. We don't have definitive evidence yet as to how he got the rifle up there.

0:40.3

Based on everything that's been collected thus far, photos, video, eyewitness accounts,

0:46.3

we do believe he likely had it in the backpack.

0:49.3

Broken down in the backpack?

0:51.3

We're still assessing that.

0:53.3

Our laboratory has taken, it looked at the rifle itself

0:57.1

and measured that against the backpack itself.

1:00.1

And if placed in this backpack, it would extend outside.

1:03.9

It would have been visible.

1:05.3

We don't have anyone who observed him,

1:07.4

who observed him with the backpack,

1:09.1

with a rifle barrel or other part of it sticking

1:13.0

out of the backpack. But the rifle would not have fit fully into this backpack to be concealed

1:19.3

and whole. We have video that was recently found of the shooter walking in a distance from his car just before 6 p.m. about 556, I believe.

1:33.7

And based on everything we have, we assess that he returned to his vehicle at that time,

1:39.5

got the backpack, and then proceeded back to the area into the AGR building.

1:45.0

And then he's observed, of course, on the roof just, you know, minutes later holding the backpack in front of him.

1:53.0

In fact, there's dash cam footage from a police vehicle that shows him briefly traversing the roof with the backpack in front of him.

2:01.9

And then it's just minutes after that

...

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