Saturday was a very good day for Odessan Matt Coday until it wasn’t.
Coday was in Butler, Pa., for Donald Trump’s campaign rally. He spoke to the crowd and met and had his photo taken with Trump. Coday pumped up the crowd speaking about energy and “drill, baby, drill.”
He said it was the “honor of a lifetime to meet President Trump.”
Coday was about 20 feet to the right of the former president in the VIP section where all the speakers, representatives and other guests were when gun shots rang out. Former President Trump was shot in the ear and a spectator was killed and two others injured.
Coday said he is still processing the assassination attempt.
“Still a lot of shock; still a lot of stun; still a lot of what the heck just happened?”
This was the first Trump rally Coday had been to in person. He said the crowd was incredible.
“Let me tell you, the people in Butler, Pennsylvania, were just exciting; they were electric. That crowd was great. There were 15,000 people, I heard. A bunch of oil and gas workers, some from Midland-Odessa that came up for the rally, some from Louisiana, some from up there, some from Houston; farmers, steel workers, manufacturers. The crowd was electric. It was an exciting day. It was truly exciting; just a lot of energy and people just really excited about reelecting President Trump and putting American workers’ families first again,” Coday said.
When President Trump was speaking, Coday said he remembers hearing one pop over his right shoulder.
“I turned that direction to look over my right shoulder and then heard several more. It all happened so fast,” Coday said.
“I don’t know if there were three, four, five after the first one, but there was one and then a pause and then multiple after that at some point,” he added.
There were screams and then there was shouting. It was chaos, he said.
He turned back to his left and saw the Secret Service jumping on President Trump to cover him.
“They acted very quickly, and of course, I see the SWAT team, guns drawn. They’re up on the stage and coming around the front of the podium,” Coday said.
“I remember them swarming the stage and trying to eliminate any future threat. … Then I remember somebody screaming, ‘He’s been shot or somebody’s been shot, or we need help.’ I turned to my left and probably about … 10, 12 feet away but up in the bleachers but higher … was the man got shot, the retired firefighter. They were waving and saying come help and we need an ambulance or he’s been shot. … I didn’t know what to do, so I climbed over the fence and just ran up there real quick just to see if I could help that man. .. It was all very chaotic,” Coday said.
He was able to get near Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former fire chief who had served for decades with the Buffalo Township volunteer fire company, the Associated Press reported.
Someone was already working on him.
“Everybody was starting to move except this young couple and I was trying to get them to move and remember the young man said, ‘We’re the family and so I said y’all stay’ because I understood them wanting to stay near their family. … Then the state troopers showed up and the other local law enforcement and they’re all up in the stands … checking to make sure if anybody else has gotten hurt or been hit and they’re telling us to keep moving further, keep moving away. But a man, who I believe was a local Butler County sheriff’s deputy because I’d seen him backstage whenever we were all waiting to meet President Trump, he was downstairs at the bottom of the bleachers on his radio trying to call in an ambulance or call in help … The state troopers carried the man out, the man who had been shot. I just put that family in touch with that deputy sheriff … so he motioned for them to come down and join the man who got shot as they were taking him, I’m sure, to an ambulance and then to a hospital,”Coday said.
He recalled he wasn’t looking at the stage when Trump stood back up and the Secret Service had determined there were no more threats.
“I remember hearing the crowd roar. You could tell from the roar that it was an excited roar, like you would hear at a Permian football game if the Panthers had just scored a touchdown,” Coday said.
“I remember thinking in my mind at that time, OK he is alive and he is OK. I remember being a little bit relieved then.”
They were then told that the event was over and everyone started to move toward the exits.
“We all walked out and we’re all trying to find our people and it was awesome. I had a team around me that protected me, just checking on me like hey where are you? Are you OK? Tons of people (started) to call me and text are you OK, and are you alive?
“It was wild because there was just a few people outside our organization and family who knew I was going to be there, so all those calls started to come in,” he said.
“I thought it was going to be the greatest memory and it turned out” that some good things happened, Coday said.
“It was an honor to meet President Trump. That is the honor of a lifetime, but that was a very dark day in our country that someone tried to assassinate the President of the United States. Like I’ve said before, I don’t like a lot of Joe Biden’s policies but I never want Joe Biden to be hurt either. I always want the President of the United States to be protected,” Coday said.
He was supposed to be at the Republican National Convention this week in Milwaukee.
“After this, a couple of the plans changed but also just because some other things that are going on. I’m still hoping to be there, especially by Wednesday. I believe President Trump speaks on Wednesday night or Thursday night. I’m certainly hoping to be there,” Coday said.
An oilfield truck driver and founder and president of the Oil and Gas Workers Association, Coday is currently in Baton Rouge, La., for business.
He started the Oil and Gas Workers Association in 2015 in in response to the Obama-Biden era weaponization of the EPA, he said.
“That really hurt U.S. producers (and) service companies and cost a lot of Americans our jobs. We incorporated this organization on April 20, 2020, the day oil prices plunged to negative numbers in this country,” Coday said.
