The family of Corey Comperatore and supporters are paying tribute to him before the one-year anniversary of his death under tragic circumstances.
BUTLER COUNTY, Pa.—The world knows how her husband died. Now Helen Comperatore is on a mission to make sure everyone knows that his final act of selfless bravery, now immortalized, reflected the way he lived.
Quiet heroism, compassion, and “giving his all” defined Corey Comperatore, his wife said, long before he became famous for protecting her and their two daughters from gunfire at a rally for President Donald Trump in Butler Township, Pennsylvania, in 2024.
Ahead of the anniversary of the shooting that Trump and two other wounded people miraculously survived, Helen Comperatore and others talked to The Epoch Times about the impact of her husband’s death and efforts to honor his life.
The former fire chief’s widow also described a fateful choice that he made on July 13, 2024—a date now etched in U.S. history.
Hours before the shots rang out at the Butler Farm Show grounds, she recalled, “Some guy just randomly came up to me and said, ‘Would you guys like to go sit in VIP seating?’”
Her husband responded: “Absolutely. Let’s go.”
As a result, “We were the first people in the bleachers,” Helen Comperatore said.
“We had first pick of those seats—and that’s where Corey chose to sit.”
That location unwittingly put the Comperatores between rooftop gunman Thomas Crooks, 20, and Trump, his intended target.
Crooks’s bullets “went right directly past us,” Helen Comperatore said. “One went right past my cheek. Another one went right over my head.”
And one struck her 50-year-old husband—the lone fatality among a crowd of many thousands.
“It was the saddest, most traumatic day of my life,” Helen Comperatore, 51, said, mourning the loss of her high school sweetheart, to whom she had been married for nearly 29 years.
Yet she believes that her husband’s death—at his first Trump rally—was part of “God’s plan.”
“The way things went down that day … God knew that this was going to happen, and it was the way it was supposed to be,” she said, adding that she and her husband shared a strong Christian faith.
By Janice Hisle
