BUTLER COUNTY, Pa.—When President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in front of thousands of rallygoers two years ago, Helen Comperatore saw something no one else did.
After shots rang out from a nearby rooftop, wounding then-candidate Trump and two other people, her husband, Corey, shoved her out of harm’s way.
Then the father of two used his body to shield his oldest daughter, Allyson; his youngest daughter, Kaylee, was in a separate section of the bleachers with her boyfriend. From below, Helen reached up and grabbed her husband’s shirt.
“I was looking right into his eyes, and that’s when he got shot. ... I saw the life go right out of him,” she told The Epoch Times. “We read each other; we didn’t have to speak. I was reading his eyes in that moment ... and—bam—it was gone.”
Initially, she felt cursed to have witnessed the tragic demise of the 50-year-old man she had loved since high school; they had been married just shy of 29 years. “I kept saying to God: ‘Why? Why would you do that to me?’ ... It was a horrific thing to see when you love somebody,” she said.
A couple weeks later, Comperatore realized witnessing that moment was, in one way, a blessing. “I know he didn’t suffer, not for one second,” she said, noting she was revealing these details publicly for the first time.
Her husband had been shot in the head, “so he probably had no idea what happened,” she said, “and I’m so grateful for that.”
Still, her heart is irreparably shattered.
And her mind churns with questions about that day on an open field in Butler County, Pennsylvania, when she was nearly killed, too.
A bullet had traveled right by her cheek. “I could feel the heat. ... It was that close,” Comperatore said. She shudders to think that her girls, who are in their 20s, easily could have lost both parents.
“It was the scariest moment in my life, and will probably forever be,” Comperatore said, “because I was that close to getting shot in the face.”
In his final acts on earth, her husband protected his loved ones.
“My husband died a hero,” she said.
Each day since July 13, 2024, echoes of the gunshots and the screams, and the images of her husband’s final moments, have replayed in Comperatore’s memory.
For her, that day was “about a tremendous personal human loss that still hurts today—the same as that day,” Comperatore told The Epoch Times on June 23.
Comperatore discussed her subsequent interactions with the president, her ongoing efforts to honor her husband’s life, and her quest for answers about everything that happened that day.
And, just before the two-year anniversary of the shooting, Comperatore and others told The Epoch Times why they remain dissatisfied with government disclosures thus far.
Seeking 75,000 Pages
At least nine federal reports have been released about the shooting at the Butler Farm Show rally grounds.
Yet voluminous records remain under wraps.
“I should be able to have all of it,” Comperatore said.
After she tearfully called upon the Secret Service for answers as the one-year mark approached, the agency finally met with her in the summer of 2025.
A nondisclosure agreement prevents Comperatore from divulging certain information from that meeting. She said the agency answered many of her questions by saying, “We just don’t know.”
Judicial Watch—a conservative, nonpartisan educational foundation known for prying loose government records—sued the Justice Department last year over Butler records.
Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch president, said the FBI failed to respond to the group’s request for records about the gunman, who was identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20.
On July 7, Fitton told The Epoch Times that the FBI’s Butler-shooting files span about 75,000 pages. Yet the FBI is reviewing only about 300 or so pages per month, he said.
At that rate, it would take more than 20 years for all the documents to be released, Fitton said.
“The FBI needs to err on the side of transparency, and they’re not doing that,” he said. “It’s standard slow-walking. And on a topic like this ... it’s jaw-dropping that they’re behaving this way.”
The FBI pushed back, in a response to The Epoch Times.
“Under the leadership of this administration, this FBI has been the most transparent in history and has repeatedly demonstrated our commitment to rebuilding trust with Congressional committees of jurisdiction, working around the clock to open the books for the American people in historic ways,” the FBI said in a July 8 email.
“This includes releasing nearly 60,000 pages to the public—some of which had been sought for decades—over four times the number released by Director [Kash] Patel’s predecessors combined, in just 16 months.”
Judicial Watch has publicly posted records that the FBI released about the Butler shooting. But officials obscured significant portions.
Those redactions are excessive and unwarranted, Fitton opined, especially since there is no criminal trial related to the incident. A Secret Service sniper returned fire and killed Crooks.
Fitton said he thinks the FBI may be reluctant to share records because “their initial instinct is just to protect material, just because they can.”
The shooting happened during the administration of President Joe Biden. The Democratic president dropped out of the 2024 presidential race eight days after his Republican opponent, Trump, was shot.
Trump defeated the Democratic Party’s replacement candidate, then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Even though Trump is now in charge, “there may be sensitivities in the FBI about how the investigation was handled under the Biden administration,” Fitton said.
FBI employees who have worked during both administrations may be seeking to protect the agency as an institution, he said.
Fitton hopes that additional records eventually will shed more light on the biggest concern about what happened at Butler: The well-documented failure to provide security for then-candidate Trump, largely because of deficiencies in event planning and communications.
“And why, institutionally, did that happen? Was there political pressure to deny him the security that ... his exposure would warrant?” Fitton asked, adding that incompetence could also have been a primary factor.
Asked about speculation that continues to swirl around the shooting, Fitton said: “Some people are never going to believe anything, so that’s fine.
“But, you know, unnecessary secrecy feeds conspiracy theories.”
Fitton urged FBI leaders to “take ownership of this process” and to adopt the posture that “there’s little reason internally for us to keep this material secret ... so just get it out there as quickly as we can.”
Certainly, the public is owed answers, Fitton said. But the need for greater transparency is most compelling for the people whom the shooting affected most directly.
Those people include Comperatore and two seriously wounded rallygoers, James Copenhaver and David Dutch. Both Pennsylvania men recently filed lawsuits accusing the federal government of negligence.
“The victims deserve as much information as possible,” Fitton said.
Uncertainty About Gunman
Many questions still surround Crooks.
Do authorities know specifically why he targeted Trump at the Butler site? Either Crooks’s motive remains undiscovered—or it’s being concealed.
Did he really act alone?
Comperatore and three other rally attendees told The Epoch Times they doubt that a 20-year-old loner—who lived about 45 miles away from Butler, in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania—plotted the ambush by himself.
Fitton said some recently released records show “there were cars that fled the scene,” raising questions over whether those people played a role in the incident.
But names of the witnesses who saw those speeding vehicles were redacted from records Judicial Watch obtained.
“This is sort of basic investigative material that should see the light of day,” Fitton said, “given the historical significance of the event.”
Trump, who had been the 45th president, was campaigning to win the second term that he is now serving. A bullet wounded his right ear after he turned his head slightly to look at a chart on a screen—narrowly avoiding a direct hit. No other current or former U.S. president had been wounded since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan survived a gunshot.
So far, all evidence about the Butler shooting does seem to point to Crooks as the gunman, Fitton said; he sees no substantive support for theories suggesting that someone else was the shooter.
Comperatore concurs. She said she has no doubt that Crooks fired the shot that killed her husband and the rounds that wounded Trump, Copenhaver, and Dutch. But she is confident he had help.
“I want to know: Who in Butler was involved in this conspiracy to do this? ... I just feel that there’s people here that may have conspired,” she said, adding that people have told her things she isn’t at liberty to reveal.
“I am just dying to know the story. ... Time might not be on my side, but I will get the truth,” she said.
Those suspicions—and that resolve—have not waned in the year since then.
“I feel like I already know a couple guilty people, and I just feel so strongly in my heart that I know what happened,“ she said. ”I just want these people to pay.”
Lingering Questions, Lasting Impact
Several rally attendees who spoke to The Epoch Times—and a host of online commenters—speculate that there could have been a second gunman. Lifelong Butler resident David Keasey wonders about that possibility. Keasey, 76, was among at least 15,000 people who went to the 2024 rally.
To this day, it bothers him to talk about the terror he experienced. “It traumatized me for weeks,” Keasey told The Epoch Times in late June.
Keasey, a fan of Trump’s frank demeanor and drive to accomplish goals, attended the rally “to get involved” in the political process.
He remembers how excited everyone was to hear Trump speak after waiting for hours under the blazing sun.
“It felt like a blast furnace,” recalled Keasey, a former steel-mill worker.
Trump had just begun his speech, “and then it was ‘pop-pop-pop’ ... and I just thought that some idiot threw out firecrackers,” Keasey said.
Soon, he realized those sounds were gunfire.
“I was on the ground, then I couldn’t get up,” because he was frozen with fear, Keasey said.
His mind raced. At first, he didn’t know whether the bullets were aimed at the crowd, at Trump, or both.
“So that had me kind of freaked out,” Keasey said. “I remember thinking, ‘Is my next breath going to be my last?’”
Keasey said the attack changed him.
It made him concerned “this is not the America I grew up in,” and he lamented the political hatred aimed at Trump, which he believes led to the assassination attempt.
“I’m so thankful that our president is fine,” he said, “but I just feel terrible for the people that got shot and hurt.”
Keasey said he continues to mention Trump, the Comperatores, and the two wounded rally attendees in his prayers.
“It just made me appreciate life,” Keasey said. “Just one second you’re here, the next second you could be gone, you know?”
Keasey said it angers him when people claim the attempted assassination was “staged” in online discussions.
“I let ‘em have it,” Keasey said. “I just say, ‘Hey, you know what, I’m from Butler. I was there; you weren’t. It wasn’t fake; it was real.'”
Two months ago, The Washington Post reported that a survey showed 21 percent of Democratic respondents believed all three assassination attempts against Trump were staged. Among independents and Republicans, 11 percent and 3 percent expressed the same belief, respectively.
Comperatore bristles at claims that the shooting was a publicity event staged to bolster Trump’s popularity and that her husband was “collateral damage.”
“My husband was not ‘collateral damage.’ He was a human being. He was a dad. He was a husband,” she said with quiet indignation.
Talking With Trump
In contrast to such remarks, Trump has shown much respect to her husband, Comperatore said.
Trump, known for his sometimes-brash public demeanor, “gives the media what they want ... but behind the scenes, he’s such a sweet man. ... He’s so kind,” Comperatore said.
She thought it was appropriate that he waited a couple of days after the shooting before calling her for the first time.
During that initial conversation, “he was curious to know about Corey, asking what kind of man he was,“ she said. ”He was hearing everything in the news, but he wanted to hear from me.”
She told Trump about her husband’s devotion to his family, his community, and his country.
The family made their home in Sarver, a crossroads in Butler County’s Buffalo Township. It takes about 30 minutes to drive to the rally site from there.
Her husband had been a longtime volunteer firefighter and served as Buffalo’s fire chief in the early 2000s. In addition, he was a 10-year veteran of the U.S. Army Reserves.
When Trump told her that his friend, Florida attorney Dan Newlin, wanted to contribute $1 million to the Comperatore family, she responded, “No money in the world will ever replace Corey.”
Trump seemed “overwhelmed” to hear that, Comperatore said, and to sense how deeply she loved her husband.
Comperatore had given Trump’s team permission to use her husband’s firefighter jacket and helmet. But it stunned her to see his belongings displayed onstage as Trump spoke and declared: “He lost his life selflessly acting as a human shield. ... What a fine man.”
Then Trump kissed her husband’s helmet, and there was a moment of silence.
The widow recalled: “I was crying so hard that I had to watch it on replay because I couldn’t hear anything that he said. ... To see my husband’s gear on TV, it was just unreal.
“Corey and I loved [Trump], so I was like, ‘Of course that’s what he would do.’”
Trump hugged the widow and her daughters with such warmth, it was “like we were his kids,” she said.
At Trump’s invitation, the Comperatores attended presidential inaugural festivities for all four days in January 2025.
Then, in June of last year, the president sent a letter to Comperatore. Unable to immediately locate the letter, she told The Epoch Times that Trump basically stated that “we were going to be connected for life because of what happened, and if I ever needed anything, to please reach out.”
Last September, a member of the 47th president’s staff checked on Comperatore following the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. Knowing that Kirk’s violent, televised death likely would be traumatic for Comperatore, the staffer relayed a message, saying the president wanted to know if she was OK and that “he was thinking of us,” Comperatore said.
Comperatore said she had not recently contacted the president to ask for more information about the Butler shooting. She wishes Trump would push the government to release more records. At the outset, the president had pledged that investigators would figure out the circumstances that led to her husband’s death, she said.
In late June, Comperatore heard from Secret Service Director Sean Curran. He asked about setting another meeting with her. “So,” she said, “maybe he’s going to tell me some things.”
Still Taking Care of Her Husband
Comperatore still receives cards and mementos in the mail from well-wishers, along with numerous emails and dozens of Facebook messages each day.
“People don’t understand I’m overloaded,” she said. “I answer as much as I possibly can.”
Yet, Comperatore said, few people can fathom what it is like to be the surviving spouse of a person who died in such a public way, in such a political setting.
“I do feel very alone ... and it’s a terrible feeling,” she said. “You just never think in your life anything like this will ever happen to you—and then it does.”
But she has found a purpose that uplifts her: working on behalf of Corey’s Cruise, a nonprofit she set up to honor her husband.
“I would die without the cruise. This is what keeps me going, because I feel like, when I’m here and I’m working to keep his memory alive, he’s here with me,” she said. “It’s almost like I’m taking care of him, still.”
With the help of a dozen board members and about 60 volunteers, the organization supports churches, first responders, and Doberman rescues, among other causes.
Last year on July 12, the Corey’s Cruise memorial motorcycle ride drew scores of bikers. It also raised $14,000, despite admonitions that such events usually aren’t money-makers in the first year, Comperatore said.
This year’s cruise will be held at the Big Butler Fairgrounds starting at 7 a.m. on July 25, and will include a car show, live music, and vendors.
The event is advertised on several Butler-area billboards, featuring Corey Comperatore’s smiling face. “I love seeing the billboards when I’m driving; there’s nothing like seeing that smile coming at you,” his widow said, breaking into a smile of her own.
Helen Comperatore relishes not only honoring her husband, but also giving back to the community that rallied around her family following the 2024 shooting.
“It shook everyone’s sense of safety,” she said, “and I also think it gave everybody a renewed appreciation for our first responders, and I think that that was very much needed, and I like that.
“I try to keep that going, because our first responders really need to be noticed more.”
And, Comperatore said, her crusade to learn the full story behind the shooting is also on behalf of the community and other concerned citizens.
“There’s so many people that want answers about that day, so many,” she said.
