“It was like getting hit with a sledgehammer right in the chest,” Dutch said, adding that he could see chunks of the bleacher and metal “flying all around” until the shooting stopped.
Copenhaver said he didn’t realize what was happening until he saw part of his sleeve get blown away.
“I turned around to my friend, and I said, ‘I thought I was shot,’ and that’s when I got the second one and then I went down,” he said, adding that he had collapsed onto the bleachers and couldn’t stood up.
Dutch and Copenhaver said the shooting has left them with ongoing health problems.
Copenhaver said he has lost 30 pounds and now has to walk with a cane. He still gets pain in his abdomen from time to time.
Dutch said he still needs help tending to his bullet wound. He lost 25 pounds and can’t drive or lift more than 10 pounds, he said.
“I never thought I’d be in this position,” he said. “I was usually the other guy helping other people out.”
“It’s a struggle every day,” Dutch said.
Another man, Corey Comperatore, 50, was killed in the shooting while shielding his family. Trump was wounded in the ear.
A Secret Service countersniper shot and killed the 20-year-old gunman, who had shot from the roof of a building about 450 feet from where the former president was speaking.
The assassination attempt raised alarm about the Secret Service and security failures that allowed the gunman to fire eight shots at the former president.
Kimberly Cheatle, director of the Secret Service at the time, stepped down this summer after lawmakers called for her to resign.
Last month, the “initial mission assurance report” compiled by the Secret Service’s own internal investigators found that bad planning and poor communication among agencies caused the security lapses that allowed the assassination attempt to happen.
Dutch said that during the shooting, he was “angry” at the security lapse that failed to prevent the incident from happening and the fact that someone “tried to shoot the president, shot into a defenseless crowd.”
“I was just angry that the whole situation even happened. “It should have never happened,” he said.
