The motives of the 20-year-old man who tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump are still unclear two days after the shocking incident, but details about the gunman’s past are slowly starting to trickle in.
Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., was shot and killed by the Secret Service after he opened fire on Trump from a rooftop just outside the Pennsylvania venue where the former president was holding a rally. The barrage of gunfire killed an attendee and injured two men.
The man who died was former fire chief Corey Comperatore, of Butler County, Pa. He is being hailed as a hero for diving in front of his family and shielding them from harm with his body.
The two others who were injured have been identified as David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pa., and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, Pa. Both men were in stable condition as of Sunday.
Trump also suffered minor injuries in the attempt on his life. He says he was shot in the right ear and photos from the rally show his face bloody as Secret Service members rushed him off stage.
The FBI is investigating the assassination attempt as a potential act of domestic terrorism and believes that Crooks, who had bomb-making materials in the car he drove to the rally, acted alone.
The agency, however, has been struggling to determine a motive for the shooting and has yet to find any threatening writings or social media comments that could help explain Crooks’ violent actions. The FBI has obtained Crooks’ phone and is working to break into it, the Verge reports.
Crooks’ political leanings are also still a mystery. He was registered to vote as a Republican but in 2021, made a US$15 donation to a Democratic campaign group.
Former classmates of Crooks say he was a shy but otherwise normal student who did well in class. In his first year of high school, Crooks tried out for the varsity rifle team but was rejected. Still, nothing about his conduct in school indicated that Crooks was capable of bloodshed, his peers found.
Who is Thomas Matthew Crooks?
Crooks grew up in Bethel Park, a middle-class neighbourhood in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. He is the son of Matthew and Mary Crooks, who are both licensed behavioural counsellors, local news outlet KDKA reports. Matthew is registered to vote as a Libertarian while Mary is a registered Democrat, according to state records.
Former classmate Jameson Myers told CBS News that, as a freshman, Crooks tried out for the Bethel Park High School varsity rifle team but failed to secure a spot on the junior roster. He did not try out for the team again in the years that led up to graduation.
Frederick Mach, the current captain of the school’s rifle team, told AP News that Crooks was turned away because he was a bad shot.
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Myers told CBS that he and Crooks were close in elementary school but grew apart in high school. He called the 20-year-old a “nice kid who never talked poorly of anyone.”
“When I did speak with him, he just seemed like a normal boy who was not particularly popular but never got picked on or anything,” Myers said.
Another classmate, Summer Barkley, told KDKA that the suspected gunman wasn’t popular but he still had a few friends and was well-liked by teachers.
“Everyone knew him as the kid who knew everything. We would always joke that if we don’t know it, Thomas will know it. Thomas knows everything,” Barkley said.
When Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022, he was among several students who earned a US$500 scholarship for achievements in math and science, according to the Tribune-Review. But despite his strong academic record, Crooks did not go away to college, Barkley said. Instead, he stayed living with his parents and enrolled in the Community College of Allegheny County.
Both Barkley and Myers said they could never have anticipated that Crooks would become violent.
“Anyone who knew him, close or not, it just wasn’t anything we saw coming,” Barkley said.
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Another classmate, Jason Kohler, has different opinions about Crooks, however. Kohler described him as a loner who often wore camo print and hunting attire to class.
“He did sit alone at lunch. He was all alone, and he was bullied every day,” Kohler told KDKA. “You could look at him and say something is off.”
But former classmate Mark Sigafoos says this description of Crooks isn’t accurate. Sigafoos had two classes with Crooks in their final year of high school and he said he never saw Crooks bullied.
“This is one of the things that is being misconstrued — he was not some type of loner trenchcoat wearer. And I will say he was definitely nerdy, for sure, but he never gave off that he was creepy or like a school shooter,” Sigafoos said. “He seemed like he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Crooks’ life after high school
Crooks worked at a nursing home as a dietary aide, according to Marcie Grimm, the administrator of Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation.
Grimm said in a statement to CNN that the home is “shocked and saddened” to learn of Crooks’ involvement in the attempted assassination, adding that the 20-year-old “performed his job without concern and his background check was clean.”
One of Crooks’ colleagues, who also went to high school with him and asked not to be named, described Crooks as “the sweetest guy,” to CNN. The co-worker added that Crooks never expressed political views at work and was helpful and caring with the home’s older residents.
“Earlier this week he was helping me with a bunch of sick old ladies (to) put ranch on their salads,” the colleague said. “It’s hard seeing everything that’s going on online because he was a really, really good person that did a really bad thing, and I just wish I knew why.”
The shooting and attempted assassination
Crooks used an AR-style rifle to shoot at Trump and rally attendees from an elevated position on Saturday, authorities say. It’s believed the firearm was purchased by his father Matthew, at least six months ago, but investigators do not yet know if he took the gun without his father’s permission.
The location of Trump’s rally is about an hour’s drive from where Crooks lived with his parents. A blockade was set up Sunday to prevent traffic near the Crooks’ house.
An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos from the scene of the Trump rally, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows that Crooks was able to get astonishingly close to the stage where the former president was speaking.
A video posted to social media and geolocated by the AP shows the body of a person wearing grey camouflage lying motionless on the roof of a building at AGR International Inc., a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm Show grounds where Trump’s rally was held.
The roof where the person lay was less than 150 metres from where Trump was speaking, a distance from which a decent marksman could reasonably hit a human-sized target. For reference, 150 metres is a distance at which U.S. Army recruits must hit a scaled human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M-16 rifle. The AR-15, like the shooter at the Trump rally had, is the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M-16.
Kevin Rojek, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, said it was “surprising” that the gunman was able to open fire on the stage before the Secret Service killed him.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose department oversees the Secret Service, said officials were engaged with President Joe Biden and Trump and “taking every possible measure to ensure their safety and security.”
Matt Carriker, the Texas-based creator of Demolition Ranch, did not respond to a phone message or email on Sunday, but posted a photo of Crooks’ bloody corpse wearing his brand’s T-shirt on social media with the comment “What the hell.”
Relatives of Crooks have not commented publicly on the incident. His father told CNN that he was trying to figure out “what the hell is going on” but wouldn’t speak about his son until after he talked to law enforcement. An FBI official told reporters that Crooks’ family is co-operating with investigators.
— with files from The Associated Press
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