Confirmed: Secret Service Missed 102 Warnings Before Shooting

A DHS inspector general report says local police sent 102 radio alerts about Thomas Crooks before the Butler rally shooting, and none reached the Secret Service because it had no joint room monitoring local traffic. The service’s command post instead received five calls and three texts in the hour before the gunfire. Federal and state command posts operated 257 yards apart with spotty radio links.

Radio traffic built over about 30 minutes: around 5:42 p.m. an officer flagged a young man near the AGR complex with a rangefinder; by about 6:08 p.m. reports said he was on the roof with a rifle. At 6:09 p.m. local officers phoned in the rooftop warning, and at 6:11 p.m. Crooks fired eight shots from 155 yards. As that warning came in, the Secret Service counter-drone operator was Googling the building’s location instead of asking officers on scene and was still searching when the shots began.

The watchdog also found the service failed to detect a nearly nine-minute drone flight Crooks flew hours earlier because its counter-drone system was inoperable and the lone technician was under-trained and had not tested it; the drone flew as close as 471 yards from the stage at about 102 feet up. The service did not share a long‑range threat with its Pittsburgh office and left areas outside the security perimeter unsecured despite a state police plan flagging them. Agents had identified the AGR roof as a sightline risk but did not block it; trucks proposed as cover near the stage were rejected over press-photo concerns and the fallback placement was never verified, leaving the podium exposed.

AI-synthesized from multiple reported sources