The bystander who died to an assassin’s bullet at a Trump rally on Saturday used his last breaths to tell his family to take cover, his widow has said.
Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former volunteer fire chief from Sarver, Pennsylvania, was in the stands near Donald Trump’s podium when a gunman opened fire from a rooftop, meaning to kill the former president.
Comperatore reportedly threw his body over those of his wife and two children to shield them from the gunfire, and was shot in the head. His last words, his widow said, were simply “get down!”
“He’s my hero,” Helen Comperatore told The New York Post at the couple’s home on Monday. “He just said, ‘get down!’ That was the last thing he said.”
She also revealed that she had turned down the offer of a condolatory phone call from Joe Biden, saying: “I didn’t want to talk to him. My husband was a devout Republican and he would not have wanted me to talk to him.”
Nevertheless, she appeared to reject some Republicans’ claims to bin blame for the shooting on Biden himself.
“I’m not one of those people that gets involved in politics,” she said. “I support Trump, that’s who I’m voting for, but I don’t have ill-will towards Biden. He didn’t do anything to my husband. A 20-year-old despicable kid did.”
She added she had not yet heard from Trump.
The FBI has identified Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, as the man who attempted to assassinate Trump before being shot dead by counter-snipers.
Not much is known about Crooks’s politics, and almost nothing about why he might have wanted to kill a presidential candidate. He had donated to a Democrat group in 2021, but was registered to vote as a Republican, and former classmates described him as right-leaning or apolitical.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” said Ohio senator JD Vance, who has since been confirmed as Trump’s 2024 running mate. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Describing the moment of her husband’s death, Helen Comperatore said that they had hoped for simply “a nice day with the family” supporting the candidate that they both planned to vote for.
The couple had been high school sweethearts, she said, and were soon to celebrate their 29th wedding anniversary.
“He was a simple man, but he put his wife and kids first all the time,” she said. “I did nothing here. I didn’t lift a finger. He did everything.”