Nearly a year after a gunman nearly assassinated President Trump at Butler, Pennsylvania, a local SWAT team member is speaking publicly about his role and claiming he stopped the shooter.

Aaron Zaliponi, an imposing 6-foot-3 and 285 pound Army combat veteran and member of the Butler County SWAT team, was standing in a field between the gunman and the stage where Mr. Trump was speaking on July 13, 2024.

After the would-be assassin Matthew Crooks fired eight shots at Trump in a matter of seconds, Mr. Zaliponi returned a single shot from his M4 SWAT rifle and believes he hit the shooter’s rifle and forced him to stop shooting.

“I just got you,” Mr. Zaliponi remembers thinking to himself as he recounted the Washington Post in an interview published Friday, adding that he is “110 percent” certain that his shot made contact.

The gunman “jerked hard to the right and slumped over his weapon,” Mr.Zaliponi says in the interview. “It wasn’t like he was ducking or flinching. Something smacked him. Whether it was my round hitting the buttstock or the buttstock exploding in his face, I know I hit him.”

Mr. Zaliponi’s shot has been called the “ninth shot” but its role that day remains disputed.

A special agent with the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, Kevin Rojek, said in an August 2024 update on the investigation, “We have no forensic evidence indicating that that round either struck our subject or the subject’s rifle.”

But no other shots were fired by Crooks for about 10 seconds after Mr. Zaliponi’s shot until a Secret Service sniper fired a 10th bullet that is credited with killing the shooter.

After the gunman was taken out, Mr. Zaliponi raced to help the victims. Mr. Trump suffered a gunshot wound to his ear, one person was killed, and two others seriously injured. Mr. Zaliponi was then was dispatched to the hospital where Mr. Trump was being treated and didn’t have an opportunity to tell his boss about the shot until late in the evening.

Mr. Zaliponi has been interviewed for several investigations in the months since the shooting, including one by the FBI, which still has his rifle. But he has not previously spoken publicly about his ninth shot. 

No law enforcement agencies have officially stated whether Mr. Zaliponi’s shot hit the gunman or his gun but a congressional task force report found that his shot “may have caused Crooks to stop firing.” The report also stated that part of the buttstock on Crooks’s rifle was shattered.

The Allegheny County medical examiner’s office told the Post that the autopsy only found conclusive evidence of a single bullet hitting the gunman but could not rule out the possibility that a second bullet hit his rifle.

SWAT commander, Ed Lenz, is the one who encouraged Mr. Zaliponi to finally speak out, saying it was important to share his story.

But Mr. Zaliponi appears fine to slip back into anonymity.

“I’d rather be on 5,000 acres in Montana on a hillside,” Mr. Zaliponi says.