Two eyewitnesses who were attending a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler County, Pennsylvania, have described what they saw during what law enforcement is calling an assassination attempt.
Rico Elmore told Scripps News he was close by when the shooting occurred. He said he yelled at the other bystanders to get down.
“I was in the bullpen area to the right of the stage when Trump was at the monitor speaking,” Elmore said in a phone conversation on Saturday evening. “We heard shots fired, and for everyone to get down. Being military myself, I yelled at everyone to get down.”
“I hopped over the barrier because they yelled for [a] medic. There was no way the medic can get to the guy who had been shot,” Elmore said. “I ran to the guy who had got shot in the head. And I held his head as he passed.”
Trump “was on the stage and the individual who was shot was in the bleachers, the stands, to the right of him, probably about three or four rows behind where I was sitting at,” Elmore added.
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Elmore appeared shaken by the incident but said he was OK.
“Nobody wants to hear gunshots go off,” Elmore said.
“Nobody wants to see someone get shot. Nobody wants to hold someone’s head and brain matter and blood are trickling out … knowing that there’s nothing that you can do.”
“As people today, we see all this stuff happen on TV, we see it happen on video games, we all think this can’t happen to us. Something that traumatic that happens right in front of you is very hard to cope with.”
“Everyone was shielding kids,” Elmore said. “People were helping other people try to get up. People were scared, and they needed some kind of guidance. I felt at that point in time that was what I was supposed to do, to yell, and try to guide people out, but be calm about it.”
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Eyewitness Eileen Cunningham describes shooting incident at Trump rally
Eileen Cunningham was in the front row of the audience in front of Trump when the shooting occurred.
“We were directly in front of him — as he speaks to you, I was directly in front of him, my husband and I,” Cunningham told Scripps News in a phone interview.
Cunningham said she did not see the shooter.
“At the end of the stand, there had to be at least a field of 150-200 yards, and then it was treeline,” Cunningham said. “It was something you really couldn’t see from where we were.”
“We were all looking left because that’s where the shots were. And there was somebody shot on our left that we could actually see,” Cunningham said. “It was hard to see what was going on. But they were really crouched down. It was like where the VIPs were sitting.”
“Everybody stayed down for a really long time. That’s where the Secret Service started pushing people out from there,” Cunningham said. “All the VIPs were gone, so whoever got hit there was gone. I saw one of the guys coming up from over there … and he was covered in blood. I said ‘Is this yours?’ and he said ‘No.’ I said ‘Whose was it,’ and he says, ‘I don’t know, they took them away.'”
“Secret Service grabbed him, took him away, and then they made us go the other way,” Cunningham said.
“He had a white long-sleeve shirt on and the whole front of it was covered in blood. And his pants were speckled in thick blood, not smeared blood.”
When the shooting occurred, Cunningham said “I turned my head, I saw [Trump] go down, and you just heard ‘pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.’ The whole time since then I keep thinking — I thought it was a joke. It’s so surreal it seems like a joke. And I kept thinking ‘I can’t believe it came that close to being an assassination of my president right in front of my face. It’s very surreal.”
“I’m still in shock,” Cunningham said. “God bless Trump and God bless America. Let’s come together.”
The shooter was killed, and a rally attendee was also dead, Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said. The Secret Service added that two other attendees were also in critical condition.
Trump said he was shot in the ear but is OK.
