Two days before a gunman wounded former President Trump in Butler, Pa., the Secret Service walked the site of the planned campaign rally with members of the Pennsylvania State Police, who had been pulled in for added security.
At some point, a state police official raised a question about the roof of a warehouse that stood within 500 feet of the stage from which Mr. Trump was to speak.
The Secret Service’s answer — according a state police commander’s testimony in a congressional hearing on Tuesday — was that a local police unit would handle that building.
“We were told that Butler E.S.U. was responsible for that area, by several Secret Service agents on that walk-through,” said State Police Col. Christopher Paris, referring to the Emergency Services Unit, a SWAT-style tactical unit made up of officers from several local counties.
That was one of many new riveting details about the shooting on July 13 that emerged from Colonel Paris’s testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee. He described a security situation that was disastrously undermined by breakdowns in communications and responsibilities, by the complex manner in which a photo of a suspicious man was relayed among the various law enforcement agencies, and by the last-minute decision for local snipers to leave an elevated vantage point to search for the suspicious man on foot.
The suspicious man turned out to be a gunman intent on killing the Republican presidential nominee. The would-be assassin, later identified as Thomas Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa., used the warehouse roof to fire off a round of shots, injuring Mr. Trump, killing a rally attendee and wounding two others.
Colonel Paris’s appearance was far different in substance and tone than the one a day earlier by Kimberly A. Cheatle, then director of the Secret Service, in a hearing in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Ms. Cheatle, though acknowledging the failure of her agency, frustrated the committee by repeatedly refusing to answer questions, prompting lawmakers from both parties to call for her resignation. She quit on Tuesday.
Colonel Paris’s testimony marked the first time that any official had identified an agency responsible for monitoring the rooftop of the AGR International warehouse, from which Mr. Crooks had fired at Mr. Trump.
But the testimony from Colonel Paris, who was not at the rally that day but learned of what had unfolded from reports and interviews with people who were, did not square with accounts from the Butler County district attorney, Richard Goldinger, to whom the county E.S.U. team answers.
Mr. Goldinger said in interviews with The New York Times last week that the E.S.U. units did not have responsibility for securing the warehouse area. In response to a call seeking clarification after Colonel Paris’s testimony, Mr. Goldinger said in a text that he was still gathering information, but “that’s not the information previously provided to me.”
A Secret Service spokesman did not respond to questions about Colonel Paris’s testimony.
Before she resigned, Ms. Cheatle gave two explanations for why no agents were stationed on that roof, despite its clear line of sight to Mr. Trump. She said in one interview that the roof was unsafe because it was sloped — an assertion Colonel Paris disagreed with on Tuesday. And she said that the Secret Service generally preferred that the rooftop be “sterile,” though she did not explain what that meant.
Colonel Paris said that the tallest structure in the area of the rally was not the AGR warehouse, but rather a water tower adjacent to it. He said no counter-sniper teams were positioned there. Representative Eli Crane, Republican of Arizona, asked why.
“I do not know, sir,” Colonel Paris said.
In his testimony, Colonel Paris said that Mr. Crooks was first identified as “suspicious” about an hour before the shooting, by E.S.U. counter snipers stationed on the second floor of a building at the AGR complex, behind and offset from the warehouse Mr. Crooks would later use.
There initially had been a team of three counter snipers in that location, though one of them left during the afternoon before Mr. Trump came onstage, according to a local law enforcement officer, who was not authorized to speak publicly. The officer said they had set up inside the building in part due to the high temperatures that day, and that the Secret Service had approved of the plan.
When they first took note of him, Mr. Crooks stood out to the officers because he was roaming around outside the rally, but never sought to get in.
“They identified Crooks for not matriculating,” Colonel Paris said. “Crooks never made it through the secure perimeter into the venue space itself.”
Colonel Paris said that Mr. Crooks was not the only suspicious person police were tracking — there were at least two others. But officers grew more concerned about 25 minutes before the rally when they saw Mr. Crooks with a range finder — a device to measure the distance between his location and the rally.
At that point, Colonel Paris said, the local police took a photo of Mr. Crooks and sent it to a state police trooper stationed in a command center with Secret Service agents. He said the agents told the trooper to send the photo to another number, which apparently belonged to someone in the Secret Service.
“There was no information that he possessed a weapon” at that time, Colonel Paris said of Mr. Crooks.
Soon after, he said, officers outside the security perimeter began to actively search for Mr. Crooks. Local officials have said that some of those in the search included four Butler Township police officers who were pulled away from directing traffic.
But Colonel Paris said that the E.S.U. counter snipers who had spotted Mr. Crooks also joined in the hunt, leaving their position and looking for Mr. Crooks on foot. He said he was not sure if those officers had been ordered to leave their posts, or if they had made the decision on their own.
Eventually, Colonel Paris said, the officers on the search realized that Mr. Crooks was on the roof of the AGR warehouse. He said he was not sure if the counter snipers would have been able to him from the windows if they had remained at their post.
A local Butler Township police officer boosted another up, so that the second officer could grab the edge of the roof and raise his head above it. He and Mr. Crooks saw each other, and Mr. Crooks turned the rifle toward him. The officer dropped down again and was hurt.
“There were other law enforcement around the building, running, but their vantage point on the ground did not lend a clear line of sight to where Crooks was at the top of that building,” Colonel Paris said.
He said that was “a matter of seconds” before Mr. Crooks opened fire. Mr. Crooks was then shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.
After the shooting, Colonel Paris said that investigators found eight shell casings around Mr. Crooks’s body on the warehouse roof.
In an interview that aired Monday night on Fox News, Mr. Trump told host Jesse Watters that he had not been told that police were tracking a suspicious person before he took the stage.
“Nobody mentioned it. Nobody said there was a problem,” Mr. Trump said. “And I would have waited for 15 — they could have said, ‘Let’s wait for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes, something.’ ”
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