A former SWAT commander balked at the “audacity” of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle blaming the “sloped roof” for not positioning snipers on the building where Thomas Crooks opened fire at Saturday’s rally for former President Trump.
Gene Petrino, who served as the SWAT commander for Florida’s Plantation Police Department for 26 years and is an expert on active shooter incidents, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that Cheatle’s “sloped roof theory” was “shocking.”
He added that there were clearly more favorable spots for snipers to scope out the venue in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Crooks killed one man and injured three others, including Trump.
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Police snipers return fire after shots were fired while Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, July 13, 2024. SWAT expert Gene Petrino pointed out that snipers who shot Crooks were on a sloped roof, despite Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s claim that they weren’t stationed on the roof of the building Crooks climbed because of the “safety concern” a sloped roof posed. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point,” Cheatle said in an interview with ABC News. “And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof… the decision was made to secure the building from the inside.”
“This site plan should have identified that roof as a major vulnerability,” Petrino said, “but there was no one there to protect it.”
Blurry cellphone video shows a rallygoer’s perspective of Thomas Matthew Crooks crawling on a roof moments before he attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump. (DJ Laughery)
“The audacity for her to say that there was an issue with the sloped roof when her men were already on a sloped roof,” he said, referring to published photos of other Secret Service snipers perched on sloped roofs in the vicinity.
Petrino also said he was puzzled by an apparent lack of drone surveillance at the rally, and questioned why snipers hadb’t been stationed at a water tower that “would have had a vantage point of all the roofs,” which is visible in aerial photos of the area surrounding the rally site.
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Police snipers return fire after shots were fired while Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
Two FBI investigators scan the roof of AGR International Inc, the building adjacent to the Butler Fairgrounds, from which shooter Matthew Thomas Crooks fired at former President Trump on Saturday. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
“That shooter should never have been able to get on the roof, let alone get those shots off,” Petrino said.
“This is a massive security failure,” he continued. “The person responsible is Cheatle – it always ends at the top.”
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Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is rushed offstage during a rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Elements of the security team’s response after shots were fired left Petrino questioning whether they were “not funded properly or inexperienced,” he said.
“It was so botched … it’s just odd – usually, if you have a 6-foot principal, you’re going to have people that are 6 feet,” he said, referring to the size of the agents on the stage.
“You’re going to push your principal down. [Trump] should’ve been moved off that stage immediately, but he wasn’t,” Petrino said. “He had control of the team, the team should’ve had control of him.”
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“From a political standpoint, it worked out really well, that he was able to fire up the crowd and show he was OK … [but] he should’ve been thrown off that stage,” Petrino said.
