Police Commander Provides More Details on Trump Rally Shooting

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.