One of the local police officers deployed at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday shot at the would-be assassin as he was firing toward the former president, Richard Goldinger, the district attorney of Butler County, said in an interview on Wednesday.
But the local officer did not fire the kill shot, Mr. Goldinger said, adding that he did not know if the officer had injured the gunman. The Secret Service has said its own snipers killed the gunman.
“Our guys did engage him,” Mr. Goldinger said, adding that the gunman had a “reaction” to the local officer’s shot.
Mr. Goldinger said he was not sure where the officer shot from.
The district attorney said that Butler County had assisted the Secret Service that day by providing four sniper teams, four quick-response teams and several officers who were stationed in a barn behind the stage at the rally. No officer deployed by Butler County was inside the building that the gunman had climbed on top of, Mr. Goldinger said.
Mr. Goldinger said that initially, he was upset to see the Secret Service apparently casting some blame on local law enforcement for the security lapses at the rally. But he said his stance had softened after he spoke with Secret Service officials on Tuesday. The officials were “contrite, apologetic to an extent,” Mr. Goldinger said.
In the first days after the incident, he said, “They were blaming local law enforcement, and I am going to defend those guys because it wasn’t their job to secure the building,” he said. “It’s still so new, I think that they’re just trying to establish what happened.”
Still, he reiterated that securing the site was primarily the Secret Service’s job, and that the local police were just assisting. He said that the Secret Service did a walk-through of the venue in the week ahead of the event and came up with a security plan.
“I don’t know whose responsibility that building was,” Mr. Goldinger said, referring to the one-story building that the gunman shot from. “But somebody should have been there.”
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