Snubbed local cop who neutralized would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks cut out of the narrative by embarrassed feds: family
A hero cop who saved President Trump from assassination at the rally in Butler, Pa., in 2024 has been snubbed for years by embarrassed federal officials, his family claim to The Post.Local SWAT team member Seargent Aaron Zaliponi is recognized in official reports as firing the shot which stopped would-be assassin Thomas Crooks at the campaign rally on July 13.“The shot neutralized Thomas Crooks,” Kim Geyer, Zaliponi’s mother-in-law, told The Post in an exclusive interview.“It prevented a mass shooting.
He saved a lot of lives that day.”“Ask anyone who was there.There was over a ten second pause, and it wasn’t until after that ten seconds a Secret Service sniper took Thomas Crooks down.”Crooks opened fire at 6:11 p.m.
from the roof of a shed located just outside the main security perimeter about 400 feet from Trump, and got off eight shots before Zaliponi responded.His shot, known as the “ninth shot” in official reports, hit Crooks’ gunstock and shattered it “causing an explosion of shrapnel [which] smashed into Crooks’ right neck and jaw area,” according to the bipartisan congressional report into the shooting, stopping his bloody rampage before the Secret Service sniper fired the kill shot, which hit Crooks’ head.Zaliponi, of the Adams Township Emergency Service Unit SWAT team, was stationed behind a barn 115 yards from Crooks, whose bullets grazed President Trump’s ear, killed 50-year-old former fire chief Corey Comperatore and critically injured two other rally attendees.“He was on the ground and he was shooting up to Thomas Crooks,” said Geyer, adding that after Zaliponi fired, “Crooks rolled over and he was stunned.”The “Final Report of Findings and Recommendations from the Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of President Trump” concluded Zaliponi’s shot “set up the delayed but successful kill shot by a Secret Service counter-sniper.”It also included testimony from Zaliponi, who said: “I knew I hit him...