Two witnesses to last summer’s attempted assassination of President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Friday recalled their experiences to Newsmax, with one, a self-described “front-row Joe” commenting that there were “red flags” for her throughout the day before the shots rang out.
“There wasn’t enough security,” one of the witnesses, Christena Kincaid, told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.” “I’ve helped set up these rallies. I’m one of the front-row Joes, so I traveled the country; I volunteer.”
She said she alerted “people in charge” a few times because “we couldn’t get through the aisles. “
“You know how they put us all in one area, but they keep the aisles clear for safety,” Kincaid added. “There were just a lot of things, a lot of red flags that day that were going off for me, where I was sounding alerts to things that day.”
But the other witness, Geno DiFabio, now a county commissioner from nearby Mahoning County, Ohio, commented that he saw nothing different that would have caused him to be on alert.
“It was just a typical Trump rally,” he said. “I mean, you go there, you make thousands of new friends because it’s a party atmosphere. Everybody’s excited. It was a beautiful day. It was hot. It was 90 degrees. But no, there wasn’t there wasn’t anything anything odd or anything about it. It was like anticipation. That’s all it was. Just everybody’s excited, and the excitement was broken. “
DiFabio said that he and others with him were standing near the press section when the gunshots were fired.
“As soon as they started, somebody yelled, ‘Hey, somebody’s got fireworks!'” he recalled. “I said, ‘that’s not fireworks.’ So everybody immediately went down. I crouched over my cousin, who I brought down here with me. She was scared. Of course, I was scared, you know, you don’t know what’s going to happen next. They’re shooting. They’re shooting at the president. They’re shooting in the crowd. You don’t know who’s going to get shot.”
But there was “no panic” in the crowd, but rather “a heavy sense of dread,” DiFabio said. “But when [Trump] stood up, it was like, I’m getting goosebumps now thinking about it, thank God.”
Meanwhile, Kincaid, being one of the front-row attendees, was even closer to the stage and saw the bullets hitting Corey Comperatore, the man who was shot and killed that day.
“First, I need to tell you, I saw [those] three bullets go to that man’s head,” she said. “I’ve been talking about it since it happened. So I actually saw the bullets go to that man’s head. So I got down. I knew what was happening. Everybody around me, I started telling, they’re fine, they’re fine, they’re fine. He just. He’s fine.”
DiFabio, meanwhile, was elected last fall as Mahoning County’s first GOP commissioner in decades, and said that he believes Trump has brought a “new hope to the working guy.”
And if one of the bullets had been “an inch either way,” the United States would be a far different place, said DiFabio.
“We wouldn’t have had the secure borders we have now,” he said. “We wouldn’t have had the new respect in the world that we have now. We would have probably had Kamala Harris [as president], and it wouldn’t have been a good thing for America.”
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