A 76-year-old veteran who was shot at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally where a would-be assassin nearly killed Donald Trump has died — and the federal agency whose failures put him in the crosshairs has faced no real accountability for it.

James Copenhaver died Wednesday at a Pittsburgh hospital, according to the Allegheny County medical examiner's office. He was one of three rally attendees struck when 20-year-old Thomas Crooks climbed onto an unsecured rooftop and fired eight shots at the then-candidate on July 13, 2024. Corey Comperatore was killed shielding his family. David Dutch survived his wounds. Copenhaver survived the day but never recovered.

Copenhaver was shot twice — once in the arm, once in the abdomen. The second bullet tore through his colon, left him with kidney damage, nerve damage, and bullet fragments still lodged in his body. He required multiple surgeries and walked with a cane for the two years he had left. His family's statement, provided to Fox News, did not specify whether his death was directly caused by the shooting injuries. But Slippery Rock Mayor Jondavid Longo, who spoke at the Butler rally, was blunt: "He survived that day, but he never fully recovered from the wounds. For two years he lived with surgeries, remaining fragments, and pain that never left him."

Copenhaver knew who was responsible. In June, he sued the federal government, alleging the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security displayed "negligence, recklessness and/or carelessness" that allowed Crooks — who had been spotted acting erratically and was the subject of an intensive search before he ever pulled the trigger — to scale a roof and open fire. The complaint laid it out plainly: a twenty-year-old was observed acting suspiciously for hours, yet managed to climb onto a building and fire eight rounds before a counter-sniper killed him.

Then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned ten days after the shooting, following a House Oversight Committee hearing. A subsequent bipartisan House task force concluded the Butler attack was preventable and identified failures in planning, communication, and security. That is where the accountability ends. A resignation is not a reckoning. No one has been charged. No one has been fired and held personally responsible. The institutional failure was treated as a management problem, and the management walked away.

Copenhaver recalled the moment he was shot in a 2025 interview with KDKA: "I was standing up looking at the Jumbotron behind me, and next thing I know my sleeve has been yanked. I could see a portion of it going by pretty fast, and I heard 'pew.' I didn't realize at the time that I had gotten shot. But I turned around, and that's when I got the second shot." He described it as "like a jolt" — a jolt he lived with until he didn't.

Trump called Copenhaver "a true American Patriot" in a social media post Thursday, writing that he "showed tremendous bravery, courageously continuing to FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT."

The family's statement described Copenhaver as a veteran whose "love of country never wavered" and who "believed deeply in the freedoms and ideals upon which this nation was founded." He went to a rally for a presidential candidate and was gunned down because the people sworn to protect the event couldn't be bothered to secure a roof. Two years later, he's dead. The Secret Service still exists. The question that lingers is the same one from day one: who pays when the state fails?