While a gunman was climbing onto the roof of a warehouse less than 500 feet from where former President Donald Trump was speaking Saturday, three law enforcement snipers were positioned inside the same complex of buildings, looking for anything amiss in the crowd.
The director of the Secret Service said the local forces were in the same building, an account suggesting that the gunman was literally on top of them. A local law enforcement official told The New York Times on Tuesday that was not the case and that the local forces were in an adjacent building.
The discrepancy in their accounts is just one unsettled element in the effort to determine how security broke down and allowed a 20-year-old with a semiautomatic rifle to open fire in a rapid barrage that left Trump hurt, one man dead and two other people at the rally gravely wounded.
At the heart of the investigation is the warren of warehouses adjacent to the rally site, the Butler Farm Show grounds.
The Secret Service and local law enforcement authorities agree that local police forces were in the warehouse complex, using it as a staging area and a perch for the snipers.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said in an interview with ABC News that local officers were inside the building used by the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, on Saturday evening. That would mean the gunman would have scaled a building while snipers were stationed inside it, watching for trouble.
“There was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building,” Cheatle said.
That was not the case, a local law enforcement official, who was not authorized to give public statements, said in an interview with the Times. The building that the gunman climbed onto was one story, and the snipers, the official said, were stationed by the windows on the second floor of an adjacent building. The official added that the local snipers, who were watching the crowd, were not assigned to monitor the buildings outside the security zone.
In her interview with ABC, Cheatle said that no officers were stationed atop the roof itself because it would not be safe.
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