Iran denies plot to kill Trump

A couple who witnessed Donald Trump’s would-be assassin shimmy along a nearby roof and set up his shot panicked for several minutes as they shouted for law enforcement intervention and watched as those efforts failed.

Mike DiFrischia, and his wife, Amber, said they flagged a nearby police officer as soon as they saw a man begin to Army crawl up the roof near the start of Trump’s presidential campaign rally Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“We started hollering to cops, ‘Hey, he’s right there!’ We could see him on the roof,” DiFrischia, 46, told NBC News.

DiFrischia said the officer, who was wearing all black with a police badge on his back, was too close to the building and could not see the shooter.

Trump was already speaking at this point, DiFrischia said.

The urgency rapidly grew when the man on the roof, later identified by authorities as 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, was a quarter of the way to the top, DiFrischia said. That’s when the crowd noticed he was holding a firearm.

“Next thing you know, somebody behind me said, ‘That guy’s got a gun!’ Everybody started running and freaking out,” DiFrischia said. “I moved over and I could see the gun with my own two eyes.”

DiFrischia said he watched a different uniformed law enforcement officer attempt to pull himself up on the roof that the gunman was on but quickly release when he got about chin level.

“As soon as he got pulled up on the roof, he just let go and fell down to the ground,” DiFrischia said. “I said, man something must have startled him.”

At that point, DiFrischia, an avid hunter with 40 years of firearm experience, said there was nothing else to do but pull out his phone and start recording.

“I knew he was now getting into position to shoot something,” he said. “I was like, my God, my heart dropped.”

His footage begins with Crooks lying on his stomach near the top of the roof. It ends with Crooks dead.

“I heard one shot and then it was bam, bam, bam, bam,” Amber said. “And then it was all over.”