Former President Donald J. Trump was whisked off the stage at his rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday after gunshots were fired toward the area where he was speaking. Mr. Trump could be seen bleeding from his right ear, and officials said that the shooting was being investigated as an assassination attempt.
The rally took place on the grounds of the Butler Farm Show in western Pennsylvania, about 35 miles north of Pittsburgh. On Saturday afternoon, tens of thousands of rally attendees started trickling in after the doors opened at 1 p.m.
Mr. Trump was set to begin speaking at 5 p.m., but didn’t appear onstage until about an hour later. Here’s how the next 11 minutes unfolded based on footage of the rally.
A spectator who had been standing just outside the grounds said in an interview with the BBC that a few minutes into Mr. Trump’s speech, he noticed that someone was “bear-crawling up the roof,” clearly armed with a rifle, and that he tried to notify the police. Law enforcement officials later said that the gunman had opened fire from an elevated position outside the rally’s security perimeter.
After the shooting, the gunman’s body was seen on the rooftop of one of the buildings to Mr. Trump’s right. An AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle was recovered at the scene, according to law enforcement officials.
“I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear,” Mr. Trump said in a post on Truth Social, his social media platform. “I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin.”
Shortly after the shooting, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign said that the former president was “fine.” Mr. Trump will still attend the Republican National Convention this week, his advisers said in a statement.
One spectator at the rally, Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old firefighter, was shot and killed. Two others were critically injured.
Scenes from after the shooting
Photographs by Eric Lee and Doug Mills/The New York Times