PITTSBURGH, PA. Saturday, July 13, 6:43 PM. Goth-pop trio Gina Gory’s set at The Government Center ended and I was flipping through the records there when a call came in from an old editor pal, Matt.
“The hell does he want?” I wondered. I just ran into the guy last night.
“Dude!” he erupted. “Someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump at his rally in Butler. I just got a call from the New York Times, and I can’t make it. They need a stringer there, now.”
“Wai-, what?” I stammered.
“Can you go?”
I hesitated. I was stunned. I had almost sent him to voicemail.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you drunk or something?”
“No,” not a drop. But my head spun all the same:
Trump. Shot. Butler. New York Times.
Me. Go. Now.
Night two of Northside Music Festival was heating up. My date was leaving soon. I was ready for dumplings from Subba to start, and then free sets all night from choice Pittsburgh bands.
“I am not prepared for this," I told him.
“Yeah,” he laughed. “That’s how these things work! Can I have this editor call you?”
Mom’s spaghetti – I was in.
I ran across the street to Javor Croatian Club, where The Garment District’s paisley psych was beginning to flutter, and beckoned my cousin’s new husband outside.
“I need your shirt,” I told him, explaining my sudden leave.
We swapped my bright red and yellow “Barrel & Flow” tee for his snug, suitably professional, short-sleeve green-striped button-down. I phoned regrets to my date as I hurried to my car and then north to the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds beyond, to chronicle the devastation wrought by the latest touchdown of this ever-churning maelstrom of American violence.
Figuring police were preoccupied, I sped. I charged my phone. I cursed my shitty air conditioning. I called sources, and those who might know sources. And from my glove box, I scrounged a few pens and a flimsy, half-used, “Pittsburgh Black Tech Nation” notebook, the size of a mini-golf scorecard.
I was in business.
Halfway there, I called Christine, my first of many new editors.
“Go to the rally site,” she instructed. “Talk to eyewitnesses. Get their name, age, profession, and hometown. I added you to our Slack channel; put your copy in there. Good luck. Any questions?”
“Yeah, uh, not to get all ‘operational security’ on you, but am I going to get eaten alive?”
Someone shot Trump! MAGA was under attack. And I was with the New York Times, gosh darn it, there to get to the bottom of things.
(She assured me I’d be fine.)
I knew I was close when I could see from the road an enormous American flag hung between two outstretched cranes, punctuating the rally site. I made toward the flashing lights of an all-black SUV that blocked the eastern fairground entrance, where a young, clean-cut, typecast Secret Service agent said, “it’s a crime scene, now” and politely told me to leave.
BUTLER, PA. 7:53 PM. I made it to the Sheetz on nearby Evans City Road one hour and 42 minutes after the would-be assassin struck the former president, and still the situation roiled. People ran to attend to someone who passed out near the road. Firefighters redirected traffic. Law enforcement interviewed eyewitnesses while other rally goers called loved ones, commiserated, and flocked to social media, to process and recount their brush with infamy.
I was desperate to start asking questions, but first, nature called. On top of the urinal next to me, someone left a copy of Ellen G. White’s Seventh Day Adventist end times exposition, “The Great Controversy.” Baffled, I took a photo, and was putting my phone away as a man dressed in red, white and blue walked in to use the other urinal.
I tried to play it cool. I knew he had been at the rally – I would have bet my cousin’s shirt on it. He and I made awkward eyes with each other, which I acknowledged with a quick, upward nod, like, “hey, crazy, huh?”
Fortunately, he picked up what I was putting down, and the first words out of his mouth were the ones I longed to hear: “Were you there, too?”
Pants zipped and hands washed, we reconvened at a table in the humid July twilight outside. Mike and Tami, husband and wife, had driven 100 miles south, from Erie, to attend their first Donald Trump rally. They sat eight rows back over Trump’s left shoulder, the same direction he turned when a bullet, or perhaps shrapnel caused by a bullet, nicked the former president’s ear.
“Relax,” Mike told me, as I turned on my cell phone’s recorder. “Your hands are shaking.”
Mike took my pen and drew in my notebook: a square to represent the podium where Trump stood, rectangles for the grandstands behind him, two circles for he and Tami, and lines to indicate the direction of the gunfire.
He kept calling what happened “surreal,” as I watched him sketch the assassination attempt. He then showed me a video he took seconds after the gunman fired. It starts with Secret Service agents forming a protective shell around Trump. You hear another gunshot, and a blood-curdling scream in the distance. It ends with Trump giving a thumbs up before he’s rushed off stage, as the crowd roars, “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
We shook hands and they departed. I rode a wave of adrenaline two tables over, to where Tiona was sitting by herself.
“I was just shocked. Someone tried to kill my – everybody calls him ‘my husband,’” she said, letting out a dry laugh.
Tiona was turning 49 at midnight; she bought her ticket to the rally as a birthday gift for herself. She used to be a Democrat, she told me, but switched parties around 2016, during Trump’s presidential ascent, which was around the time her cancer returned. (She is now in remission.)
“I paid $42 to get here. And there's another, I guess, $52 to get back home,” she said, as she arranged an Uber to Pittsburgh’s Northside.
She then paused for 10 seconds, as a nearby engine roared.
“This chaos,” she continued. “We all are together. We all are one. He is the one who has to be president, to fight for us all.”
Back in my car, without my laptop, I typed up copy on the “notes” app on my phone and uploaded audio to a speedy AI transcription service. I double-checked quotes and details before firing off a few paragraphs into the Times’ #politics-live slack channel, where unseen editors labeled these and other eyewitness accounts with the “eyeballs” emoji and sculpted them into a cohesive breaking news story.
I was a foot soldier, the tip of the sphere for a newsroom goliath, and my next mission was in: “check out this press briefing at the butler TOWNSHIP police dept,” texted Christine, from the breaking news desk.
First, I needed water. Back inside Sheetz, the cashier told me the woman who checked out before me had been sitting up front at the rally. So I chased her down in the parking lot.
Sara had been seated in front of the bleachers to Trump’s left, alongside her best friend, Jodie, and Jodie’s son Jimmy, when she heard two pops, the second of which she knew for sure was gunfire.
“We heard it go past our heads,” she said. “It sounded like little whistles.”
She tackled and covered Jimmy and an elderly woman sitting in a walker chair next to her. She saw Trump give a thumbs up and then she looked toward the bleachers, where she heard a woman scream.
“That's when I [saw] the guy shot, with blood all over.”
“But also there was this girl,” she continued. “She was probably 20, around my daughter’s age, who was by herself. She was hysterical. And I felt so bad. Jodie and her son got up and I pulled that girl up with me because she was scared. I was like, ‘just come with me,’ because she was looking at me and you could just tell she needed somebody. So I grabbed her. We started running.”
“It was – it was insane.”
Two miles down the road, twilight gave way to nightfall, the humidity relented, and an uncanny stillness blanketed the Butler PD.
Some five or six news outlets were the only people on hand, milling about in the parking lot, waiting for a presser that didn’t seem to be happening.
“Ooh, the New York Times is here,” an unimpressed USA Today reporter said when I introduced myself.
I returned to my car and caught my breath. I sent an audio recording to a Times producer who requested it. And I said hello to KDKA’s Jen Barrasso, who sat in the passenger seat of the news van next to me, relentlessly working sources as she attempted to ID the still-unknown shooter: you can’t have “breaking news” without someone out there, breaking news.
Another message sent me five miles east to Butler Memorial Hospital, which received Trump after the shooting. There was even less going on here than at the PD. When one of the two security guards keeping reporters away from the hospital entrance departed, the other told me Trump left an hour ago. But they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go on record, which made the information all but useless to me.
At 11:20, Christine texted that the presser was back on, for 11:45. I drove back through Butler at a reasonable speed and arrived at the PD to find the media’s ranks had swollen with reporters who had been covering the rally and stuck at the fairgrounds, as well more reporters, like me, who flocked to Butler when shots rang out five hours ago.
At 11:52 PM, representatives of the FBI, state and local police – but not the Secret Service – met with some 50 assembled media. The big news was there was none–they would not reveal the shooter’s identity, even though the New York Post had already named him (though not before reporting, and later retracting, that it had been “a Chinese man.”)
The Times’ staff reporter was live-tweeting the presser. I tried to take notes in my tiny notebook but struggled to keep up with the onslaught of names, titles, spellings, affiliations and information.
I was saved by another Times editor, Kim, who texted: “pls call me asap leave the press conference to do it.”
She had the perp’s address. She sent over a short dossier and told me to go there, knock on the door, and get a comment from whoever answers. “They won’t be sleeping,” she added.
An hour later I was in Bethel Park, Pittsburgh’s southern suburbs. A few blocks from the perp’s place, on Milford Drive, I slowed down to holler at a local news cameraman setting up for a live shot next to a newly-erected barricade.
He told me local police had set up a “staging area” for media at the high school. But it was a ruse, he explained. They just wanted us away from the perp’s house.
I went anyway. Nothing was happening. A CNN producer who drove in from DC offered me a cigarette, and some local TV news cameramen made pee pee jokes with a female reporter nearby.
I left around 2:30, came home, and passed out. At 5:43, Holmes, the CNN producer, who had slept in his car at the high school, texted me to say there was still nothing happening. I slept a little more.
PITTSBURGH, PA. Sunday, July 14, 8:43 am. Christine texted and asked, when I was ready, to head to Allegheny General Hospital, where authorities life-flighted two of the wounded. "Let me quickly shower and crush some coffee and I can be there by... 930," I texted.
I planned to post up in the hospital cafeteria, but security wouldn’t let anyone in the building without a patient’s name.
“Who are you here to see?” they asked.
“Uhh…”
Fortunately, I overheard another guest say who he was visiting. I walked outside and headed to another entrance, armed with a name and pleased with my cunning, but chickened out before I got to the next security desk. This was no time for some jabroni stunt!
I canvassed outside instead, but not for long: an editor needed me north, back to Butler, and the house of the only man killed at the previous day’s rally – Corey Comperatore.
SARVER, PA. Butler County. 11:47am. I expected satellite trucks and a gaggle of reporters outside the Comperatore home; instead, a dozen long stem roses placed on the family’s front lawn was the only sign of anything out of the ordinary that sleepy Sunday morning.
This was heavy. I needed to warm up first, so I started with the neighbors.
The first two neighbors didn’t really know him. At the third, John, a retired machinist, answered the door. I said I was sorry to bother him, but I was there to ask about his neighbor who lived across the street.
“What about him?” he asked.
Oof. So I told him.
“Hey, Clov,” he said to his wife, who was eating lunch inside.
“That guy in the corner house,” he told her, gesturing across the street, “was one of the people killed yesterday.”
Clovia gasped. She told me he was friendly. She knew them as the family with the two dobermans.
“It’s just so sad,” she said.
Across the street, another neighbor gave a polite, but firm, no comment. I was running out of neighbors; I could put it off no more.
The Comperatore’s dobermans barked their heads off when I knocked on the family’s front door, upon which hung a decorative red, white, and blue heart made of tinsel, perhaps still up from Independence Day a week before.
To my surprise, they opened. It was Helen, Corey’s wife, now-widow. She looked exhausted. Her devastation was palpable. And she still had the courtesy to say “I’m sorry” before telling me she didn’t want to talk.
Her brother, George, came out instead. He said “we’re doing terrible,” because of course they were. After maybe 90 seconds, a knock came from inside their front window. The family’s pastor came outside and said no more, that they “want to be alone in their grieving process.”
I said I understood, that I was sorry, and I left.
I felt gross, but weirdly exhilarated. I got the quote. Until now, I had a few contributor lines – a note at the end of an article that said I helped out on reporting. But surely now, I was on my way to that coveted New York Times byline.
I spun up a few grafs on my phone and dumped them into the #trump-shooting-victims Slack channel before traveling a half-mile down the road to the Buffalo Township Volunteer Fire Company, where Comperatore had been chief for 3 years in the early 2000s. He remained a “life member” and had gone out on a fire two years ago. That Sunday afternoon, a black sash hung somberly below the nameplate on his locker, his gear just how he left it.
They took reporters back one at a time to speak with the fire chief and station president. A Washington Post reporter who said she worked the “American dysfunction” beat went in right before me, and I had to check an AP reporter from Harrisburg who tried to cut the line.
I spoke with Kip and Randy, the fire chief and company president, about their fallen friend. They showed me pictures of Corey, praised his integrity and his devotion to family. They were sad, sometimes teared up, but seemed to cherish this noble burden – to champion their stolen friend’s valor, to advocate for his heroics like so many fallen firefighters before, just never quite like this.
I ended the interview like any other, and asked if there’s anything more they wanted to say.
“Just let the public know that you couldn't meet a more humble guy."
My car was broiling and I had no signal, so I made for Rock-A-Fella's and typed up my account over a sandwich and several unsweetened iced teas. I was finally writing passages, as quickly and thoughtfully as I could, trying to instill a sense of place and pathos to somewhere I had never been. For this I was being paid $35/ hr, plus mileage and expenses, unless I had a byline that day, in which case pay was 50 cents a word instead of the hourly rate.
At 2:15 PM, I spoke with another editor, Mary, for the Times’ religion section. She heard there was a prayer service scheduled at Comperatore’s church that afternoon and wanted me to get some comments from the congregation. She wanted to know what Corey’s faith was like. Was he a martyr? Was Trump a martyr? For what cause?
Cabot Church was deserted except for a reporter from ABC News. Door open, I respectfully nebbed around the lobby, sent Mary some photos of pamphlets, and tried to get a feel for the place before leaving a note requesting someone contact the Times’ religion reporter, please.
I waited for a while longer, and the only person to show up at the church was someone who saw me alone on my phone in the parking lot and asked if I, too, was playing Pokemon Go. So I left, went to Bethel Park, where very little had changed, before returning home to call it a night and reflect on all that transpired.
BETHEL PARK, PA. Monday, July 18, 7:51 AM. By now, the Times had flown in a number of their own reporters to take over the reporting. I was left to stake out the shooter’s home.
“It’s one of those scenes that’s enough to make you hate the profession,” one of their reporters told me.
If the police barricades went down, I could run up to the house alongside the rest of the international press and knock on the family’s door. Or take notes if they sent out a lawyer to make a statement, or something.
I sat under a big oak tree in a front lawn caddy-corner, caught up on leads, the latest reporting, and took in the scene. I ran into other hired guns from Pittsburgh and met journalists from Tokyo, Helsinki, Gothenburg and beyond. Broadcast crews would pull up, post up, go live, and roll out, only for another van to pull up, take its place and do the same, only in another language.
It was in the 90s again that afternoon. One crew ordered Rita’s Italian Ice. I asked the high school kid who lived in the house whose front yard I had been sitting to fill up my thermos with the hose he was using to water plants outside; he filled it up inside, with ice, and gave me an electrolyte pack, too.
Liam, dressed in his ex’s Slipknot hoodie, said he rode the bus with the shooter for a short time but he didn’t know him – the kid kept to himself, and he didn’t really talk much. That didn’t stop a cluster of media members from interviewing Liam anyway. We were desperate for insight, and Bethel Park was already getting sick of us. Everywhere I went, another reporter had already been. No one knew this weirdo or his family – please, just leave us alone.
On Tuesday, an off day (from the Times, at least), a Reuters photojournalist I met in Bethel Park texted me to ask if there had been “no trespassing” signs on the lawn of the Comperatore house when I was there Sunday. I told her no, and then wondered how many times it took people like me to knock on that poor grieving woman’s door before the signs appeared.
When I returned to Bethel Park on assignment Wednesday, again trying to learn about the shooter, I gave out like 100 business cards, especially at South Hills Village Mall. My legwork yielded 3 replies:
- One from a kid I met at a coffee shop, who was hopeful I could get some coverage for his Dad’s band, “Ferocious Ghosts.”
- A mystery number, which texted “the old men mall walkers are discussing current events. Maybe they will talk to u.”
- The head of security at South Hills Village Mall, who told me that the mall was private property, gosh darn it, and I shouldn’t hand out business cards there.
And just like that, my gig was ending. I was removed from the #politics-live Slack channel, no longer privy to the online scuttlebutt of the breaking news vanguard, as corporate media’s gaze shifted westward, to Milwaukee, host of the Republican National Convention.
About a month after my assignment ended, I contacted the people I interviewed at Sheetz to see how they’d been. Mike told me he and Tami were fine, but he was considering a lawsuit against the Secret Service for negligence. Tiona told me she couldn't sleep for three days after the shooting. Sara didn’t respond to my Facebook message, but her friend Jodie posted that she thought Sara was a hero for how she protected those around her when the bullets flew.
My final count: 36 hours, 3 contributor lines, 1 front page byline, an invoice worth $1,719.38, and the opportunity for future freelance assignments the next time news breaks in Western PA, should I answer the call.
