'Kind of a part of history': Crawford County man captures cellphone video of Trump shooting

Something didn’t feel right to Mike DiFrischia.

The business owner and registered Republican had attended rallies twice previously for former President Donald Trump.

But something seemed off, he said, when he saw a teenage boy “with the look of panic on his face” dart through the Butler Farm Show fairground crowd minutes after Trump took the stage around 6 p.m. Saturday.

DiFrischia, standing near a 6-foot-tall oak tree right at the rally’s fenced perimeter, turned toward a warehouse 30 or 40 feet away. There, he saw a different young man — later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park — “army-crawling across the roof.”

“The guy on that roof’s got a (expletive) gun!” someone nearby shouted.

DiFrischia swung out his Samsung Galaxy phone, which boasts five camera lenses. The video he quickly shot captured Crooks taking aim at Trump through the scope of an AR-15-style gun.

Eight or nine seconds into the video, shots rang out.

“He’s gonna shoot into this (expletive) crowd,” DiFrischia remembered thinking in the moment.

By the time the roughly 70-second video ended, panic had engulfed the crowd of thousands, and a Secret Service sniper had fatally shot Crooks. As the would-be assassin fell on his side, his bloodied face was turned toward DiFrischia.

The video on DiFrischia’s Android phone is one of the only known images of the shooter taken before he fired at Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s U.S. presidential race.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think this would be my reality,” said Amber DiFrischia, 45, of West Fallowfield, Crawford County, Mike’s wife. “We were there to witness an assassination attempt.”

“It’s not cool,” added Mike DiFrischia, 46. “But we are kind of a part of history at this point.”

In the three days since the assassination attempt, the DiFrischias have found themselves knee-deep in their 15 minutes of fame, fueled by camera-wielding national media who work in stark contrast to the couple’s humble roots near the bucolic Shenango River and Pymatuning State Park.

The website TMZ on Saturday posted much of DiFrischia’s video, then claimed they owned it, which has triggered a legal battle. DiFrischia, who is consulting with an attorney in Pittsburgh, now won’t share the video with reporters.

The couple, whose home sits roughly halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie, appeared on “Good Morning America” and Fox News on Sunday. KDKA followed on Monday and “Inside Edition” on Tuesday morning. The couple, who joked with a TribLive reporter that they haven’t eaten a meal since the shooting, had another interview scheduled Tuesday night with The Associated Press.

Earlier Tuesday, the couple trekked back to the Butler Farm Show grounds, the 100-acre site of the Trump rally, to make sense of what had happened. They again noticed a water tower — they estimated it’s about 100 feet tall — standing just yards from the warehouse Crooks scaled.

Both Mike and Amber don’t understand how a structure like that could have gone unprotected during a national-level political rally.

“We the support ‘the blue,’ you know — but everyone with us was saying the police were very confused and didn’t know what to do,” said DiFrischia, as he sat outside the demolition and recycling company he runs in Jamestown, Mercer County.

“How can you blame the local cops? They’re there for assistance,” he added. “They were doing their job. It was the Secret Service’s job to ensure those buildings were covered. … Why wasn’t the perimeter covered? I don’t get it at all.”

“I’m not downing anybody,” Amber DiFrischia added. “But what a (expletive) failure by the Secret Service.”

Saturday was the first Trump rally Amber DiFrischia had attended. The same can’t be said for her husband.

He trekked to Erie County and to an airport 11 miles north of Youngstown, Ohio, to see Trump speak during the GOP leader’s first presidential campaign in 2016. He said both rallies felt safer than the one he attended last weekend.

On Jan. 6, 2021, DiFrischia also drove to Washington, D.C., to support Trump. That day, a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College votes needed to formalize President Joe Biden’s victory at the polls.

DiFrischia said he attended a political rally in the capitol and did not take part in any violence. More than 1,400 people have been charged, and about 540 sentenced to jail time for federal crimes related to the event.

“I realize it happened,” he said. “But we were there 10, 12 hours and we never saw it.”

DiFrischia said he backed Trump in 2016. In 2020, DiFrischia was like about 75,000 Butler County residents who voted for Trump — more than twice the number who voted that year for Biden.

He knows his part of the state is key if Republicans want Pennsylvania to swing its 19 electoral votes to Trump. He plans to vote for Trump this November, too.

“There’s just too much dividing this country,” he said.

DiFrischia doesn’t expect to see another major political rally in Butler County.

“Are (Republicans) going to try to come back and do another rally (in Butler)? I don’t think so. It’s tainted at this point.”

“I’m not going back to that one,” Amber DiFrischia added.