On any given Sunday, former fire chief Corey Comperatore could be found at his parents’ Pennsylvania home with his two Doberman Pinschers.
“Corey was there every week doing yard work, climbing ladders, cleaning out their gutters. He was always helping others,” says former Menifee city councilman Tom Fuhrman, Comperatore’s uncle.
Fuhrman was shocked to hear that Comperatore, a former fire chief at the Buffalo Township Volunteer Fire Company in Pennsylvania, was shot and killed at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday evening.
Comperatore, the stepson of Fuhrman’s brother, was shielding his wife and two daughters with his body when the gunfire rang out at the rally.
“He was a father. He was protecting his family from the bullets that were being fired,” President Biden later said in a speech, extending his condolences to Comperatore’s family. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Comperatore “died a hero.”
Fuhrman said half a dozen of his family members had been attending the rally. After he saw news of the attempted assassination on television, he called around, anxiously awaiting updates.
At 10 p.m. on Saturday, Fuhrman’s daughter called him to tell him that Comperatore was identified as the man who was killed.
The shooting “claimed the life of my brother,” Dawn Comperatore Schafer wrote in a Facebook post. “The hatred for one man took the life of the one man we loved the most.”
Her brother had just turned 50 and had “so much life left to experience. This feels like a terrible nightmare but we know it is our painful reality,” she wrote.
“Everyone is emotionally affected and feeling the pain,” Fuhrman said of his family. “I know what it’s like to lose a son, so my heart goes out to my brother and his family.
“You think about them every day, and they stay with you forever.”
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