Family Says Feds Buried the Role of the Local Cop Whose Shot Stopped the Butler Shooter

Leave a CommentFamily Says Feds Buried the Role of the Local Cop Whose Shot Stopped the Butler ShooterCommentary

The family of Sgt. Aaron Zaliponi, the Butler County SWAT officer whose shot stopped Thomas Crooks from firing at President Trump in July 2024, says the FBI and Secret Service have played down his role to protect their own image after the security failures that day.

“The shot neutralized Thomas Crooks,” his mother-in-law, Butler County Commissioner Kim Geyer, told the New York Post in an interview published Oct. 28, as quoted by The Right Scoop. “It prevented a mass shooting. He saved a lot of lives that day.”

“The Secret Service wanted the credit, that after massive security failures they got their act together and took this guy out,” Geyer said. “There was no consideration that our local people, who weren’t there to protect the president, ended up being the ones that neutralized the threat.”

What the congressional record shows

Crooks fired eight rounds from a rooftop outside the rally’s security perimeter on July 13, 2024, wounding Trump, killing former fire chief Corey Comperatore and critically injuring two others. Zaliponi, a team leader with the Butler County Emergency Services Unit, fired the ninth shot from about 115 yards away.

Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., a member of the House task force that investigated the shooting, wrote in his views in the task force’s final report, filed Dec. 5, 2024, that the ninth shot “caused would-be-assassin Thomas Crooks to stop firing.” He wrote that it struck the plastic buttstock of Crooks’ rifle, “causing an explosion of shrapnel as the broken stock smashed into Crooks’ right neck and jaw area below his right ear,” and that “his shot setup the delayed but successful kill shot by a Secret Service counter-sniper.”

By the report’s timeline, Zaliponi fired 5.89 seconds after Crooks’ first shot. The Secret Service’s fatal shot came 10.05 seconds after his. Higgins also cited the county medical examiner’s autopsy, which found “patterned abrasion consistent with rifle buttstock abrasion” on Crooks’ neck and bullet fragments in his neck and right shoulder.

“I knew I hit him, too, because, like I said, you know, I’m prior service military, so I have combat experience,” Zaliponi told the task force.

The FBI has not agreed. “Regarding the round fired by the local officer, we have no forensic evidence indicating that that round either struck our subject or the subject’s rifle,” Kevin Rojek, then head of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, said in August 2024, Fox News reported. Higgins noted that the bureau never said the shot missed.

Honors from outside Washington

The National Rifle Association named Zaliponi its 2025 Law Enforcement Officer of the Year, Police1 reported in May. In October 2025 he was honored at the Sen. John Heinz Law Enforcement Awards Luncheon near Pittsburgh, where Geyer presented him with an award, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday also gave him an “In the Face of Danger” award, the Western Journal reported, citing WTAE-TV.

“I did my job,” Zaliponi said there.

He told American Rifleman in July that federal investigators still had the AR-15 he built and fired that day. “They said I’d get it back in about two years and it has been nearly two years now,” he said.

Zaliponi, who served 14 years in the Army National Guard and deployed to combat zones three times, said he regretted only one thing. “I told the one victim’s wife when I finally got to meet her, is that I am sorry I did not see him sooner,” he said.

The bottom line

A local sergeant with a red-dot sight and a rifle he built himself found the shooter in under six seconds and fired from 115 yards. A member of Congress who examined the evidence concluded that his shot is why Crooks stopped firing, and the autopsy he cited found a wound pattern consistent with a shattered rifle stock.

The FBI’s answer, more than two years later, is that it has no forensic proof. The bureau has never said the shot missed, and it has kept his rifle past the two years he says he was told to expect.

The agencies whose failures let Crooks onto that roof should not have the final word on who stopped him. The FBI should finish its testing, return Zaliponi’s rifle and state its conclusion plainly, and the administration should give the sergeant the federal recognition that police groups and Pennsylvania officials have already given him.

Sources