Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told ABC News in an interview on Tuesday that a decision was made to put local law enforcement inside the building that gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed on top of to shoot former President Donald Trump on Saturday instead of the rooftop due to the “safety factor” of putting someone on a “sloped roof.”
Cheatle told ABC News, according to an excerpt that the Daily Mail published:
That building, in particular, has a sloped roof at its highest point. And, so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof…And, so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from inside.
Cheatle’s comments explained why local law enforcement officers were inside the building that 20-year-old Crooks climbed onto despite the building reportedly being a staging and lookout point for local law enforcement assisting the Secret Service.
While local law enforcement commonly supplements the Secret Service at special events — such as campaign rallies — the Secret Service is in charge of the security plan.
Cheatle is facing calls to resign after Crooks was able to get within 150 yards of Trump and fire at him eight times, piercing his ear with a bullet.
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C-SPANWPXI Channel 11 News reported Monday that a member of Beaver County’s Emergency Services Unit had spotted Crooks on the rooftop nearly 30 minutes before the shooting and called him in as a suspicious person. The station also reported that before that, another local law enforcement officer had spotted him on the ground, taken a photo, and called him in as a suspicious person, as well.
It is not yet clear whom they told about the suspicious person.
Sources also told Channel 11 that an officer checked the grounds for Crooks at that point but did not see him where the first picture was taken.
Cheatle acknowledged that rally-goers alerted law enforcement about Crooks but said, “Unfortunately, with the rapid succession of how things unfolded, by the time that individual was eventually located, they were on the rooftop and were able to fire off at the former president.”
She acknowledged in the interview that “the buck stops with me” but said she would not step down.
President Joe Biden has called it an “open question” if the Secret Service should have anticipated the assassination attempt.
“The question is: Should they have anticipated what happened? Should they have done what they needed to do to prevent this from happening? That’s the question; that’s an open question,” he told NBC News’s Lester Holt.
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