‘Something went wrong’: Parallels seen between Oct. 1 shooting, Trump assassination attempt

Some mass shooting experts see parallels between the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting in Las Vegas and the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, including a shooter in an elevated position and questions about security.

Trump was shot Saturday afternoon during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said a bullet “pierced the upper part of my right ear,” causing “much bleeding.” Two attendees were critically injured and one, Corey Comperatore, was killed.

Security ‘failure’

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN on Monday that the shooting was a security “failure.” President Joe Biden has ordered a review of the rally’s security.

Crooks fired shots from a roof less than 150 yards from Trump. In the Oct. 1 shooting, Stephen Paddock killed 60 people and injured hundreds at an outdoor music festival from a suite on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay.

Las Vegas was also the site of what a federal complaint said was a 2016 attempt to shoot Trump when a British man named Michael Sandford tried to grab a Metro police officer’s gun at a rally.

Elevated risk

Ashton Packe, a retired Metropolitan Police Department detective sergeant who responded to the Oct. 1 shooting and worked with the Secret Service on protection for visiting presidents, said one lesson from the Las Vegas shooting was that law enforcement has to anticipate threats from high elevations in open-air locations.

After the shooting, Metro started a new rifle program to train officers to shoot at elevated targets.

He said an advance team would have documented elevated locations at the rally site, but he thinks there was a breakdown in communication about the roof from which Crooks fired.

“Every time a shooting occurs, something went wrong,” said Katherine Schweit, a former FBI executive who created the agency’s active shooter program and worked on protecting presidential events.

Both the Pennsylvania assassination attempt on Trump and the Las Vegas shooting had a high shooter, she said. That poses a risk because people don’t tend to look up, she said, and their shots are not fighting gravity as much as if they were fired from the ground.

“Every security plan has to include the concern that a shooter might be above you,” she said. The Secret Service’s plans should include the possibility of a sniper, she said, and a wide security perimeter. After-the-fact analysis will examine whether the Secret Service looked high and wide enough, she said.

Charles Joe Key, a ballistics expert who was on presidential details as a police officer in Baltimore, said an elevated position gives a shooter the ability to see a target while remaining hidden. But in the case of Crooks, he said, the building was not tall enough to provide him with much of an advantage for shooting or being hidden.

‘It was a clown show’

Key didn’t see a parallel between the shootings other than both shooters were disturbed people, but he was critical of the way law enforcement handled the Trump rally. Buildings around Trump were not adequately staffed, he said.

“From beginning to end, it was a clown show,” he said of the rally.

Jaclyn Schildkraut, a mass shootings researcher, said there is little information on Crooks but that presidential assassins are similar to mass shooters. She said both have been studied with the path to intended violence model, which maps the trajectory from grievance to fantasizing violence to planning.

The only similarity she saw between the Oct. 1 shooting and the shooting at the Trump rally was the issue of security.

After Oct. 1, she said, there was a question about how Stephen Paddock got a large number of guns into his hotel room undetected. In the case of the Saturday shooting, there are questions about how someone could get on a building near a former president, set up a gun and fire multiple rounds, she said.

But she said it’s difficult to say what could have prevented the assassination attempt. “No matter what we do, everything is a Monday night quarterback situation,” she said.

As the investigation progresses and Crooks’ motive remains unknown, there could be another parallel if authorities cannot determine why he tried to kill Trump.

At a Monday briefing, Mayorkas said, “And you will recall, I think, in the very, very tragic shooting in Las Vegas quite a number of years ago, because of the fact that the assailant then was shot and killed, a motive was not identified at all.”

Retired Metro Capt. Joshua Bitsko, who was on the team that broke into Paddock’s suite, said the best thing to do after a shooting is to come together as a community. Las Vegas did that after the Oct. 1 shooting, he said, and it needs to happen on a national scale.

“As a country, we’re grieving,” he said.

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.

Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra Saunders contributed to this report.