A man who spoke before former U.S. president Donald Trump at Saturday’s rally in Butler, Penn., told CNN that he jumped over a barricade to comfort an individual who was bleeding after being shot.
Rico Elmore spoke to CNN as he walked away from the rally stage. His white shirt was stained with blood from the victim, who he said he did not know.
Elmore described jumping over the barrier and putting his hand on the head of the attendee who was shot.
“All we know is shots were fired, and then I jumped over the barrier and put my hand on the guy’s head that was profusely bleeding,” Elmore told CNN.
He said he didn’t know the attendee and he was “just a stranger.”
Elmore was visibly shaken up but said he was not harmed. He said he only saw one attendee hit and did not see what happened to Trump.
The former president said on Truth Social on Saturday that he was shot in the ear but his campaign said he was otherwise fine. The Secret Service said hours after the shooting that one rally attendee is dead and two others are critically injured. The gunman shot from outside the rally and was “neutralized” by the Secret Service, spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.
Senate Republican candidate Dave McCormick was sitting in the front row of the event. McCormick told CNN he saw the “immediate attack on the president” and a person behind him who appeared to be severely injured.
McCormick told CNN that Trump had just announced him and invited him up to the stage, when about a minute later he heard “a series of shots – about seven or eight shots – just ‘pop, pop, pop.’”
“It was all of a sudden just chaos. The Secret Service immediately covered the president, jumped on top of him, and the crowd immediately went to the ground,” McCormick said.
McCormick said he looked over his shoulder behind him and “it was clear that somebody had been hit.” People around the man were trying to administer first aid, he said, as it took several minutes for medical assistance to get into the crowd because it was so dense.
“But you can imagine with that kind of incident happening, it’s very hard to know what’s coming. … It seemed like the shots were coming from my front – so the president’s left – which makes sense why the person behind me was hit. But I’m not sure if there were also shots coming from the other direction, so as you might imagine it was chaotic and confusing in the moment,” McCormick said.
McCormick said he and all of the roughly 15,000 attendees in the crowd went through metal detector screening before they entered the rally.
Joseph Meyn told CNN that a man near him was shot.
“Very shocking … a lot of people just thought it was fireworks going off, I knew immediately it was gunfire,” Meyn said.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.