By Tommy Acosta
Sedona, AZ — Talk about irony.
Law enforcement personnel were actually in the building the sniper fired from.
Say what?
Who could imagine that a would-be assassin, with impudence, would dare to scale an edifice with a bunch of cops inside to do his business?
It’s not only ironic but a kick in the face after being down. Here is a building full of cops and there he is on the roof of that building trying to kill the ex-president.
Who would think that anyone would be so brazen? So, security ignored the roof, even after being alerted there was someone on it crawling with a rifle.
They took it for granted that because there were cops inside the building, it was secured.
Witnesses reported that an officer was alerted by the public of the gunman. The officer tried to climb the building to investigate but was confronted by the gunman, causing him to fall backwards on top of another local officer who was hoisting him up.
It was reported that the officer tried to alert the Secret Service but was too late.
What he should have done after hitting the floor is whip out his gun, fire three shots into the air, throw the gun far from himself, put his hands on his head and kneel down so as not to be shot.
That would have alerted the Secret Service to cover Trump with their bodies and the Secret Service snipers to get a bead on the would be killer.
But one would guess there are protocols and the police officer had to call it in rather than take action.
If you watch the video of the shooting and listen carefully to the replay enough times, you will count 10 shots being fired by the gunman, a number that has now been verified by audio experts.
Go ahead. See and hear for yourself.
Approximately 10 seconds after the last shots were fired by the gunman, a single shot, different in sound than the others, not as loud, can be heard at the precise instant a woman screams.
If you don’t catch it at first watch the video again and you will hear the kill shot attributed to the Secret Service sniper who shot the would-be assassin in the head.
All kinds of excuses are being and will be made as to why there were no Secret Service snipers on the roof of that building considering it provided an unimpeded line of site to the podium and should have been sanitized prior to the event.
Conspiracy theories will abound, Excuses will be made. Fingers will be pointed. Blame will be shared.
But questions will remain.
How did the gunman get through all the security, scaling the side of a building full of law enforcement agents?
Why, even though he was earlier spotted and labeled suspicious, no one followed up?
They say he even cased the site with a drone.
Why did it take so long for the law enforcement authorities to grasp what the public was seeing and take action?
How did Secret Service and other law enforcement snipers positioned on other roofs fail to see him on the roof of American Glass Research?
What triggered his desire to assassinate the ex-president?
Was he a Manchurian Candidate?
And why was the gunman only able to squeeze off ten rounds when it took at least 10 seconds after his last shot for a Secret Service sniper to locate him and neutralize the threat?
That means he had an additional ten seconds to wreak havoc. Yet, he did not take advantage of the time he had left to fire another ten to twenty rounds. Did the long gun jam? Did he run out of bullets?
Was the AR 15 fitted with a scope?
Were outside bad actors involved as part of an insidious plot, ran by Iran, to kill Trump?
Is the public being told everything or is there something going on deeper that is not being reported?
Let us hope that’s not the case.
1 Comment
The USSS depends upon local, state and other federal agencies to include the US Military to help provide security details.
Unfortunately many local Chiefs of Police and Sheriff’s have zero law enforcement experience and get elected and hired based upon college education, city government experience and politics. If said agency was led by a head who has no real world law enforcement experience then their entire organization would likely be substandard, under trained and unable to perform a proper security apparatus.
I worked with the State Department and Secret Service when Ronnie Raygun went through Italy for talks with Gorbachev in Geneva. Delta Force was the primary rapid reaction force and the Italian Polizia and Carabinieri were responsible for outer perimeter security like the local agency was in this case the EX POTUS’s outer perimeter.
In my experience the USSS is an excellent well trained organization (military Criminal Investigation Units are modeled after them) but VIP security is never 100%. There are always mistakes made and lessons learned From Kennedy, Raygun to Judge Falcone full on security was in place but loopholes were found by their assailants who got lucky. As they IRA used to say about British Forces, “we only have to get lucky once” “they have to be lucky always”.
So blaming any one person or agency for a lapse when the actual apparatus is hundreds sometimes thousands of personnel with redundant policies and procedures is ludicrous. Preventing assassinations is like preventing school and workplace shootings. No matter how much training is done to counter them they still happen.