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Aaron Zaliponi, Butler PA police officer, interview

Aaron Zaliponi, US House TaskForce code name "butler-esu-cat-tl-2"
fired the first police shot, 5.55 seconds after the shot that hit Trump and Copenhaver
and 0.765 second after the 5th of 5 very fast enemy gunshots(5 shots in 0.78 second).
Zaliponi is 100% sure that his 1 bullet, a Hornady TAP Barrier, hit the shooter.

In the video below, Zaliponi says:
at the 39 second mark:
"I knew I hit him, wounded him, mortally wounded him"

after saying, at the 30 second mark:
"he immediately went down...staggered"

How could Crooks have 'staggered', from a prone position?
The official narrative is that Crooks was in a prone position for the entire ~6 minutes after his run, across roofs, to reach his only static spot on the AGR6 roof.

Some quotes from Zaliponi's TaskForce interview(linked above):

page 32: "I know I hit him. Like there's no doubt about it. He goes down. He kind of jerks to the right, and then he kind of slumps over slowly and then kind of slowly rolls backwards out of my field of view."
page 73: "slowly rolled over, you know, off to his right side. He then kind of like then rolled out of my -- rolled down the hill, like, you know, down the roof."

Zaliponi's claims are believable , but don't match evidence

Thomas Matthew Crooks had only 1 gunshot, through his left upper lip, through his neck, and then re-entering his right upper back.
Where's Zaliponi's claimed gunshot? In another enemy gunman, who fell off the roof and died.
Zaliponi's account of Crooks going down and rolling weren't seen, no blood smears were seen on the roof.
Zaliponi would have known if his only shot had hit Crooks' rifle, which is the coverup account. But Crooks' rifle looks damaged on the top of the carry handle end, most easily explained by impact of the same shot, Crooks' one and only bullet, which exited his upper back, and hit the end of his rifle.
The Fox Nation interview shows a roof location almost 30 meters west of Crooks
And Zaliponi apparently never objected to that roof location, shown in this picture:
In this interview, below, Zaliponi says he knows he "wounded him...mortally wounded him".

I agree that Zaliponi mortally wounded someone, but that it wasn't Crooks, who was shot 10 seconds later..

Aaron Zaliponi's interview by Fox Nation:

Could Crooks' AR15 have been in this position, when he was shot, by someone other than Aaron Zaliponi?
The rifle has been shown only where it was moved to, away from Crooks' body, east, by the first officer on the roof, Washington County SWAT officer Matt Shaffer(not to be confused with local countersniper, Ben Shaffer)

Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins has claimed that Sgt. Aaron Zaliponi's 'ninth shot' hit the buttstock of Crooks' rifle.
But, from the Washington Post's 11 July 2025 Zaliponi interview:
"Higgins said the FBI told his office that a reconstruction of the buttstock indicated that the Secret Service countersniper's round was responsible for the damage. Higgins said he was skeptical and called that a 'magical bullet' theory."

North Carolina journalist, Ken Silva, published a book, June 2026, on amazon.com for US$32, in which he claims or suggests that 'bullet fragments' in Crooks' shoulder could be from Zaliponi's shot.
That seems unlikely, given that Zaliponi identified his 1 bullet fired that day as a Hornady Tap Barrier, 62gr, a bullet for busting concrete and other obstructions, to the target.
Zaliponi has said, in his Fox Nation interview, he's sure he wounded, and mortally wounded, his suspect.
And a quote from Crooks' autopsy, released by Silva, describes those fragments:
"X-rays additionally show multiple small, retained bullet fragments in the mid and right inferior aspects of the head, posterolateral right neck, and right shoulder/upper back."
Crooks' 1 and only bullet hit a tooth and grazed a bone on it's way through his neck.
Predictably, fragments of his only bullet ended up in his lower head, neck, right shoulder, and upper back.

From the interview. page 101, of David King, who's credited for killing Crooks, King couldn't see any wounding or mortal wounding of Crooks, before King fired his shot:

Question:"...through you rifle scope before you fire your weapon, did it appear that Mr. Crooks was in any sort of distress, injured, anything of that nature?"
Answer:"It didn't appear so."
Question: Okay. What was he doing?
Answer:"It still looked like he was aiming out in his rifle. And from what I could tell, it was on his right shoulder facing out, and he was down like he was aiming through it. So it looked like he was attempting to fire again."
Question:"Okay. And did it look like he was having any issues or malfunctions with his weapon, or it looked like he was in a position to shoot?"
Answer:"He was in a position to shoot."

Lt. Matthew Pearson's bodycam apparently was the only video record of Aaron Zaliponi's one bullet fired.
Pearson's bodycam, like all of them, was silent, to make sure you can't hear any of the dozens of suppressed shots fired.