On Saturday night, at a rally in Pennsylvania, a man fired multiple shots at former President Donald J. Trump, who was onstage addressing the crowd. Mr. Trump was safe though injured after the shooting, but one spectator was killed and at least two others were critically injured. The Secret Service said the gunman was dead.
Doug Mills, a New York Times photographer who has documented every president since Ronald Reagan, was at the rally as part of a small pool of photographers taking pictures in a buffer area near the stage.
Mr. Mills was just feet in front of Mr. Trump when he heard a few loud pops.
Members of the Secret Service rushed the stage, covering Mr. Trump. And as those around him dropped to the ground, Mr. Mills kept clicking the shutter button on his Sony digital camera, which can take 30 frames per second. “I could see blood on his face,” Mr. Mills told the Times reporter Victor Mather on the night of the rally. “I kept taking pictures.”
Those pictures, including one that a former F.B.I. special agent says shows the path of a bullet flying past Mr. Trump’s head (the F.B.I. has yet to confirm what struck Mr. Trump), have populated news reports, filled social media feeds and informed an anxious nation.
In an interview with Times Insider on Sunday, Mr. Mills reflected on his experience. Here is the edited and condensed conversation.
According to a retired F.B.I. special agent, one of your photos may have captured a bullet’s path. You also took photos of Mr. Trump grabbing his ear. When did you know something was wrong?
I knew something was wrong when I saw him drop behind the podium. I’m not around guns a lot, so I don’t know what they sound like. It sounded more to me like a motorcycle backfiring, or a piece of farm equipment. When I heard the noise, I didn’t immediately think somebody was shooting. When he went down and I saw the agents rushing the stage, I thought, Oh my God, he’s been shot.
When they blanketed him, I thought I heard them yelling, “Sir, sir!” They were on top of him; there was a lot of chaos, a lot of screaming: “Get back, get away!” I heard somebody yell “active shooter.” When he stood up, it was the first time that I realized he was alive.
He gave that fist pump, completely pissed off, just very mad. The next second, his face looked like it had been drained of color, he was pale and you could see the blood on the side of his face.
Secret Service agents are trying to usher him off the stage. What are you doing and thinking?
I don’t know why, but I had this instinct from covering different presidents for the last 40 years — I thought, How are they going to get him off the stage? I kept thinking the closest stairs were to his left, my right. Once that dawned on me, I was like, OK, I’ve got to get over there. He was lifted up; they helped him get to his feet.
I got over to the side of the stage where they were walking him off. There was a lot of pushing, a lot of jostling, a lot of yelling. I just tuned it all out and tried to capture the moments in history. That’s what I do; that’s what we do, all the photographers in the pool that day.
You told our colleague Victor Mather that you were thinking: “I hope I get the right shot. I hope I’m not shot myself.” How did you remain so calm?
My instincts just jump into my photojournalism DNA. There was a moment, people are diving on the ground and the Trump staff is yelling, “Doug, get down!” I thought, Oh my God, I could be shot. But I don’t know why, I just kept doing my job, trying to report a little history.
I am so sorry that somebody else lost their life. An innocent person who just came to the rally to see part of democracy. I’m very thankful that the former president was not more seriously injured.
How did you get information — and your photographs — to The Times’s newsroom?
After the former president was put into his SUV and rushed away, members of the Secret Service and the local police were saying: “Hey, all of you guys who are in the buffer have got to get out of here. You’re walking through a crime scene now.”
They took us into a tent that is normally used by the president before he comes onstage. We were ushered in there, and then they closed all the drapes. Members of the staff were very upset. There were a lot of tears. That’s when it really hit me.
I look down and I’m like, I have to start sending pictures. I use a Sony camera and I had a Sony transmitting device; I was able to send pictures to the office. Once I sent in the first group, I called Jennifer Mosbrucker, one of our editors.
Then I took a couple of deep breaths, looked back at my camera and started looking at the pictures. I thought, Gosh, I think I may have been taking pictures and videos right when the shots came out. I looked back at those images on my camera and I called Jen again. I was like, Jen, I can’t see very well with my camera, but it’s the whole sequence of him speaking and then all of a sudden he reaches up to his ear.
Then I started getting calls from other editors, making sure I was OK. I texted my wife and my daughters. We had little cellphone service right during the rally, but once everybody left, as they cleared the whole area, then I started getting a ton of text messages.
I kept communicating with the office. Officials made us pack up our equipment. I went to the parking lot and it was completely jammed. I thought, OK, I’m just going to sit in my car here and file. I sat there until 10:30 at night.
Were you aware, at the time, of the significance of what you were capturing?
No, I really wasn’t. I didn’t think of it in the big picture. The gravity of it had not sunk in.
But by probably 8 or 9 last night, I thought, Wow, there’s an image or images out there that have recorded history.
I’m grateful that I was there to capture it, and incredibly grateful that I wasn’t injured and none of my colleagues were injured. But it’s really troubling to know that the former president was shot.
When you asked the question, I got chills because it’s not something that you think about every day. It’s not something I strive to do every day, to think about being part of a situation like this, but it happens. Luckily I was in the right place at the right time, and I had the right equipment.
Years ago, you worked alongside Ron Edmonds, a photographer for The Associated Press who died last month. He won the Pulitzer Prize for photos of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan outside a hotel in 1981. As things quieted down, were you reminded of him and the images he made of Mr. Reagan?
Ron Edmonds was a mentor of mine, somebody I worked with at The A.P. for 15 years. He and I would exchange shifts in the White House. I learned so much from him. He was there the day that Reagan was shot. We had spoken about that a number of times — what he was thinking; why he didn’t look away.
I think one of his sayings was, “When the shots were fired, I went forward, I didn’t go backward.” I feel like that’s something I did yesterday: I didn’t go backward. I didn’t go down, despite everybody yelling at me to get down. I’m sure that had a lot to do with the instincts that had been instilled in me from my colleagues.
I distinctly remember him saying, “I hope you never have to go through something like this.” And here we are. Sadly, history has repeated itself.
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