| As gunfire erupted at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Butler last July, Aaron Zaliponi glanced up and caught sight of the shooter’s head and shoulders jutting above the peak of a roofline about 115 yards away. The Butler County SWAT team operator, standing in an open field between the gunman and the rally stage, snapped up his rifle, aligned the red dot of its scope with the shooter’s chin and fired a single shot. Would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks immediately jerked to his right and slumped back from the roof’s ridge, ending his volley of eight gunshots over five seconds that left Trump bloodied, one rallygoer dead and two seriously injured. Zaliponi, a 46-year-old Army combat veteran, is convinced that his round — which public officials have called the “ninth shot” — struck Crooks’s rifle and forced him to stop shooting. Yet one year later, the significance of Zaliponi’s shot is still unresolved. | 
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