Corey Comperatore was buried in the summer of 2024 after shielding his family from bullets at a Trump rally.
Now a federal watchdog has confirmed those bullets should never have reached him.
What the government's own report found this week is the detail nobody in that agency wants made public.
Secret Service Missed 102 Radio Warnings From Local Law Enforcement Before Thomas Crooks Opened Fire
The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General spent nearly two years investigating the assassination attempt on President Trump. The report is a 64-page record of failure at every level.
Local law enforcement transmitted 102 radio warnings about an increasingly urgent search for a suspicious person.
The Secret Service never heard them.
Not because the transmissions didn't happen. Because the Secret Service set up its communications room 257 yards away from local law enforcement, in a completely separate location, with no shared radio channel.
While police were broadcasting alerts, Secret Service agents were receiving only five phone calls and three text messages. By the time the warnings became urgent enough to cut through the bureaucratic wall, Thomas Crooks had already fired eight rounds.
At 6:09 p.m., local law enforcement called the Secret Service room with a direct warning: suspicious person on the roof of the American Glass Research building. The communications supervisor and the counter-drone operator didn't ask where the building was.
The operator searched the internet for it instead.
He was still looking when the shots rang out.
Secret Service Identified the Butler Rooftop as a Threat and Failed to Block It
The OIG report's second major finding is worse than the first.
Agents identified the American Glass Research building as a line-of-sight threat during pre-event walkthroughs.
They knew that the rooftop had a direct view of Trump's podium – just 155 yards away. They had a solution ready: trucks already parked on the grounds could be repositioned to block the sightline.
Trump's campaign staff said no.
The trucks would interfere with press photographs.
The Secret Service site counterpart accepted that answer and proposed an alternative placement. No one confirmed the trucks moved. No one told supervisors the rooftop exposure remained. The OIG found the sightline was never closed.
The roof stayed open. Crooks climbed it. He fired eight times.
Secret Service Counter-Drone System Failed as Thomas Crooks Surveilled the Butler Rally Site
Crooks flew a drone over the rally site for nearly nine minutes that afternoon, surveying both the stage and the AGR rooftop he planned to use.
The Secret Service had a counter-drone system on location. It was broken.
The lone operator was undertrained and could not repair the equipment. He spent hours on hold with the vendor while Crooks completed his flight undetected. By the time the system was restored, Crooks had long since finished his aerial survey and was preparing to climb.
Secret Service Accountability After Butler Pennsylvania Assassination Attempt Remains Incomplete
Senator Rand Paul's Homeland Security Committee concluded last year that the Butler failures were not isolated lapses. They were systemic.
While Thomas Crooks was scouting that rooftop, Biden's Secret Service was turning down requests from Trump's protective detail. The committee confirmed the agency denied multiple requests for additional staff and assets to guard Trump during the 2024 campaign.
Alejandro Mayorkas – the same DHS secretary who spent years insisting the border was secure – called those reports "baseless and irresponsible."
The OIG report released this week proves otherwise. Classified intelligence about a long-range threat to Trump existed before Butler and never reached the agents responsible for his safety.
Six agents received suspensions ranging from 10 to 42 days.
Corey Comperatore's sister Kelly had a response to that. "How does something like this happen and nobody is fired?"
The widow, Helen Comperatore, put it more directly. "We were all sitting ducks that day. Our blood is all over their hands."
The OIG issued seven recommendations in its new report. The Secret Service agreed with all seven. That is what accountability looks like inside the federal bureaucracy – concurrence with a checklist while a man's family buries him.
Four of those seven recommendations remain unresolved.
The OIG confirmed it in writing: the Secret Service "did not provide evidence of a process for lead agents, supervisors, or others to approve mitigation plans before the event."
The people responsible for protecting the President of the United States watched a known threat develop – warnings on the radio, a drone in the air, an open rooftop they had flagged themselves – and did nothing that actually mattered.
Corey Comperatore is still dead. The man who should have stopped this was Googling a building address.
Sources:
- DHS Office of Inspector General, "The Secret Service Missed Opportunities to Prevent and Disrupt the Attempted Assassination of President Trump on July 13, 2024," OIG-26-13, July 2026.
- Louis Casiano, "Secret Service missed 'multiple opportunities' to prevent Trump assassination attempt: watchdog," Fox News, July 2, 2026.
- Tom Gantert, "Secret Service Missed 102 Warnings Before Trump Assassination Attempt In Butler: Report," The Epoch Times, via ZeroHedge, July 3, 2026.
- Jim Hoft, "Bombshell IG Report: Secret Service Was Searching the Internet for the Shooter's Rooftop Location During the Butler Assassination Attempt," The Gateway Pundit, July 3, 2026.
- C. Douglas Golden, "Strange Findings – DHS Investigators Release Report on Secret Service Failures at Butler Assassination Attempt," The Western Journal, July 3, 2026.
- Senator Rand Paul, "Chairman Rand Paul Releases Final Report Detailing Secret Service Failures in Attempted Assassination of President Donald J. Trump," Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, July 14, 2025.
- "Secret Service Has 'Blood on Their Hands' After Trump Rally Shooting, Corey Comperatore's Sister Says," CBS Pittsburgh, July 11, 2025.