Corey Check, a local conservative activist and Republican committeeman in Butler, Pa., and his friend Nathan Rybner were sitting in a section of seats to the right of where former President Donald J. Trump was standing onstage on Saturday evening when they heard a series of loud pops. The sounds seemed to be coming from over their heads in the section where they were sitting, they said.
“I heard what I thought was firecrackers,” said Mr. Rybner, a Republican committeeman from Erie County, Pa. “It did not sound like a typical gunshot.”
They were sitting close enough to the stage that as Mr. Trump spoke, they could take photos of themselves with the former president in the background. They watched in shock as Secret Service agents rushed toward Mr. Trump.
Some of the other attendees in their section tried to flee the chaotic scene that followed, Mr. Check said, but a Secret Service agent ordered everyone to get down.
“The first thing I thought to myself was, America’s under attack,” Mr. Check said. “I grabbed the hands of a couple of people I didn’t even know. We said the Lord’s Prayer. I called my family and told them I loved them.”
When they were allowed to stand up, Mr. Rybner said he saw what appeared to be blood on a higher level of the seating section behind them. “There was a lot of blood,” he said.
Before the rally devolved into chaos, while Mr. Rybner was still waiting for Mr. Trump to arrive onstage, he said he passed the time by looking at the crowd in the section. “I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” he said.
Mr. Check, speaking by phone minutes after the shooting, was still struggling to process what he had just experienced.
“We chanted ‘U.S.A.’” after all this happened, he said, adding that the country will live on “despite what some maniac did to Trump.”
“We’re alive. And we will never stop. America has been here, we will always be here, chanting ‘U.S.A.’ Because we’re not done. These people will not destroy our country,” he said.
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