BUTLER, Pa. >> One year ago, eight bullets fired in under six seconds scarred the American psyche.

Millions watched live as Donald Trump abruptly stopped speaking, clutched his ear and then dropped to the ground below a human shield of Secret Service agents. The gunman barely missed: A quarter-inch stood between the now-president of the United States and history-altering calamity.

The attempted assassination jolted a fractured nation and transformed the 2024 campaign, boosting Trump in the polls after inspiring a minutes-later endorsement from the world’s richest man. It gravely wounded two Pennsylvanians and tore volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore from his wife and daughters, whom he died trying to protect. It unleashed a torrent of conspiracy theories about the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican who the FBI said acted alone. It entrenched beliefs that political opponents aren’t just disagreeing; they’re at war.

The Washington Post caught up with one rallygoer who’s story is featured here. Others are still untangling how the brush with death that sweltering July afternoon warped their worlds. Some appeared in images captured by Post photographer Jabin Botsford before, during and after the shooting. Several described a lingering fear of crowds and a yearning to uncover more about how this happened. Others traced dramatic personal upheaval to the day Trump described as when God “spared my life for a reason” in Butler, Pennsylvania.

All said they left changed. Here is Ava Spencer’s story.

“That’s just Pap,” Ava Spencer remembers thinking when her grandfather pointed to the snipers.

The 10-year-old girl wasn’t interested in the men positioned above them on rooftops, clad in black and what looked like bucket hats. (Kevlar helmets, Pap corrected.) She wanted to see Trump, a celebrity in her western Pennsylvania house. “Funny,” the fifth-grader called him, “and always on TV.”

It was her idea to brave the rally throngs, which tickled her family, a conservative if not over-the-top MAGA bunch. “I’m not a Republican first,” Pap liked to say. “I’m a veteran.” They flew an American flag next to a Marine Corps flag on the rural property the family shared. Ava, her sister and her parents lived on one side of the 2.3-acre lot with the meticulously watered lawn. Pap and Nana Kitty built a gray-paneled home on the other. A U-shaped driveway connected them.

That’s why they were so close, Ava explained.

They’d just settled into the fifth row at the Butler Farm Show when Pap did what Pap does.

“If you hear a loud boom,” he told Ava, gesturing toward the snipers, “don’t stand up and look around. Get down.”

She referred to such guidance as “his military stuff.” Carl Curtis, 58, leads support groups for other veterans. After serving in Kosovo, he deals with PTSD. Deals, not struggles, he says, because he learned how to manage it.

In his darker years, though, he told Ava that he felt like “some kind of alien.” It took a lot of processing to become the grandfather present on Earth, enjoying a giggle while scanning for threats. “Situational awareness,” he calls it.

Not yet 5 feet tall, Ava couldn’t see much from her rally seat. So Pap, a longhaired rebel before his ascension to first sergeant, took her suntanned hand and led her to the front. She perched atop a steel security barrier, legs dangling, until a woman in a suit gently ordered her down. They’d both chuckled about that, the novelty of a Secret Service reprimand, before everyone’s attention shifted to Trump.

He was talking about immigration, Ava recalls, when it actually happened — the booms. Her head went blank, and right away, she cowered. An elderly woman knelt next to her, praying. Pap dove over them both.

What Ava remembers next is her face being wet and asking, “Why would someone do that?”

“Idiots,” Pap had replied.

That night, she couldn’t sleep and clung to her ginger tabby cat, Milkshake. Every loud noise for weeks sent her heart racing.

Pap knew how bad it could get. He didn’t want the girl feeling like an extraterrestrial. So they talked and talked. Her brain needed to recover from that scare, he told her. Deep breaths. Focus on the green of the grass and the blue of the sky.

Now when Ava is buckled in the back seat and hears a car roar past, she doesn’t freak out. She turns. She looks. All clear, she thinks before nudging herself to rejoin her family’s chatter.

“Situational awareness,” she says.