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Thomas Crooks asked his boss for the day off, telling him he had ‘something to do’, before travelling to Saturday’s Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania and shooting the ex-president.
The would-be assassin told colleagues at the Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center that he would see them on Sunday.
But a Secret Service agent at the Butler rally ensured that he would be the last person that Crooks saw as he locked eyes with the killer before shooting him dead.
Agents found him in their sights and one pulled the trigger seconds after the 20-year-old shot dead Pennsylvania fire chief Corey Comperatore, critically injured two others and hitting Trump in the right ear after scaling a building 147 yards away.
‘They were looking at him while he was looking at them,’ a senior federal law enforcement official told CNN.