Trump returns to the scene of the crime

Butler County in western Pennsylvania is solid Trump country.

In front yards, on roadsides and at gas stations, the messages on billboards are blunt.

“Bulletproof” is one of them, in a picture of the former president with his fist raised shortly after he was shot in that city.

Another overtly political text reads: “Even my dog ​​hates Biden.”

The former president received twice as many votes as Joe Biden here in 2020 and beat Hillary Clinton by a similar margin in 2016. In fact, this county has voted Democratic only once in the last 150 years of presidential elections.

Butler has always been proud to be known as the home of the American Jeep, but this year it's better remembered for one reason: A former Republican president was inches away from being assassinated.

A bullet hit his ear that day, July 13, and Butler is going through his own healing process as Donald Trump returns to the same location, the Farm Show grounds, for a rally on Saturday evening.

The BBC has spoken to some of the people who were just meters away from him when the shots were fired.

There is sadness and guilt among local Republicans, but also resentment that this was the case in their district – such a staunch supporter of Trump.

“That was the saddest moment of my life,” said Jim Hulings, chairman of the Butler County Republican Party, who was 30 feet away at the time and believed Trump had been killed. “I was horrified to think that someone had the audacity to shoot a big man.”

Jondavid Longo, the mayor of Slippery Rock, a small town just a few miles away, was on stage as part of the warm-up program shortly before the shooting.

As the gunman began shooting, he instinctively used his body to cover his pregnant wife. He says he replays the incident in his head every day.

“It’s difficult for us to cope,” he said. There is guilt because someone else lost their life that day, he says, and two others were seriously injured.

That person was Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former volunteer firefighter who died after exposing himself to bullets to protect his wife and daughters.

His widow Helen seems lost and distracted when I meet her. It's clear she has problems.

“I think about it every day. I see it every time I close my eyes.”

She and Corey were lovers since childhood and were married for 29 years. And both are staunch supporters of Trump.

They joked that day that the former president would invite Corey to the stage, she said. Days later, his fire chief's jacket was taken to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and placed on the stage as Trump gave his acceptance speech for the nomination.

“I just cried because I said he got his moment on stage with Trump.”

Like Helen, Trump supporters in Butler have dozens of questions about how it happened.

While 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks' motive remains unclear, the series of safety errors that led to him pulling the trigger has become much clearer.

Two hours before he opened fire, he was able to fly a drone over the site undetected because Secret Service surveillance equipment was not working.

Communication failures meant that suspicious sightings of Crooks were not relayed to all elements of the Secret Service an hour and a half before he shot Trump.

More than half an hour before the shooting, he was seen by police pointing a rangefinder at the scene – a device often used by hunters in tracking their prey.

But just over 25 minutes later, Crooks managed to climb to the roof of a local business and fired eight shots. Seconds later he was dead, a single shot in the head from a Secret Service sniper.

Those few seconds still haunt many of the witnesses.

In one of the most famous images of the shooting, taken by a Reuters photographer, Lucie Roth can be seen in the VIP seats behind Trump.

At first she thought the shots were fireworks, but then she heard screams of “Get down!” and fell to the ground.

“I really thought he was dead. I saw the Secret Service descend on him like he was the quarterback at a football game.”

She was still devastated when she heard the crowd roaring and cheering and knew he was okay.

Renae Bülow and her 11-year-old son and Trump impersonator Gino Benford were just a few meters away from Lucie and Gino is clearly visible in the Reuters photo, complete with a blonde wig and dark suit.

From the family home in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Gino says he was both scared and calm, “half and half,” when the shots rang out.

“I thought, who would want to do something like that to such a great president?”

When we were reporting right before the rally that night, we started interviewing people as they left.

But one man stood out. He wore a Trump hat with fake orange hair growing out of it and held a can of beer.

Greg Smith's words describing how he saw the gunman on the roof and tried to alert the Secret Service resonated around the world.

It provided the first clue to the catastrophic security failure and a clip of the interview was viewed by tens of millions of people on social media.

When he met him again this week in his shop, just a few meters from the crime scene, he was still angry.

“I was very frustrated when I spoke to you, extremely frustrated because I think about the time frame. He was on the roof crawling for minutes and we were pointing and screaming.”

“I remember thinking, ‘Why? Why doesn't someone do nothing? How does this happen? How can I still hear President Trump talking while this is happening?'”

There is also pride in what he has done by speaking out. People tell him he is part of history, the first person to tell the world what happened.

As someone who usually shies away from the limelight, he added: “I jumped out of my comfort zone and did this. And I’m glad it turned out the way it did, that everything I told you that night turned out to be true.”

Greg, who listened to Trump speak from outside the rally that day, has no plans to attend Saturday's event. He said his 12-year-old son was traumatized by it and would cringe every time he heard fireworks.

Although Helen Comperatore and her daughters are still upset about the security breaches, they will return.

That's what Corey would have wanted, she says.

“I've tried to achieve that in everything I do. What would he expect from me? What would Corey do? And that’s how I do it.”