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The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a gunman armed with an AR-style rifle was able to get close enough to shoot and injure former President Donald Trump at a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania, in a devastating failure of one of the agency’s core duties.
The FBI on Sunday identified the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.
The gunman, who officials said was killed by Secret Service personnel, fired multiple shots at the stage from an “elevated position outside of the rally venue,” the agency said.
An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos taken at the Trump rally, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows the shooter was able to get astonishingly close to the stage where the former president was speaking.
A video posted to social media and geolocated by the AP shows Crooks’ body lying motionless on the roof of a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm Show grounds, where Trump’s rally was held. A different image shows Crooks wearing a gray T-shirt with a black American flag on the right arm, with a bloody wound to his head.
The roof was fewer than 150 meters (164 yards) from where Trump was speaking, a distance from which a decent marksman could reasonably hit a human-sized target.
For reference, 150 meters is a distance at which U.S. Army recruits must hit a human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M16 assault rifle in basic training. The AR-style rifle, like that of the gunman at the Trump rally, is the semiautomatic civilian version of the military M16.
President Joe Biden said Sunday he has directed an independent review of the security at the rally.
Biden said he also directed the U.S. Secret Service to review all security measures for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee.
Audrey Gibson-Cicchino, the Secret Service’s coordinator for the convention, told reporters later the agency was satisfied with what she called its comprehensive planning for the Republican convention.
Biden urged Americans not to make assumptions about the motive of the shooter. He said investigators are working swiftly to investigate the attack.
“Unity is the most elusive goal of all,” he said, but “nothing is more important than that right now.”
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