Mills said he never experienced anything like it in his more than 40 years covering U.S. politics.
“He went down and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s been shot,’ because everybody was yelling, ‘Down, down, down, active shooter, active shooter!’” he said. “I get chills now saying it because, you know, it’s still very raw.”
In addition to images, Botsford was also able to capture video of the moment by wearing Ran-Ban Meta smart glasses that take short videos, which he told The Washington Post he had “somehow” remembered to turn on.
“It was super scary,” he told the Post. “Nobody knew what was going on. The president fell to the ground, and I was going to make a picture of it even though the staff was like, ‘You guys need to get down.’”
“I’m still trying to process it all,” he said.
Capturing the moment Trump was shot
Mills said the moment he got backstage, he began to frantically transmit photos to his editor in New York when it dawned on him that he may have captured the moment Trump was shot.
He called his editor and asked her to look closely at the images.
“She called me back about five minutes later and said, ‘You won’t believe this.’ I was like, ‘What?’ I thought I’d messed something up,” he said. “And she said, ‘No, no you captured the bullet piercing behind his head.’”