BUTLER, Pennsylvania: Thomas Crooks paced beside a warehouse outside the Butler Farm Show grounds as a crowd gathered for one of former President Donald Trump’s signature outdoor rallies.
Crooks had already been classified as a suspect by the police. When two police officers checked him, he was already crawling on his stomach on the roof.
“He has a gun,” shouted a passerby.
One officer lifted the other to the edge of the roof. As the officer pulled his head over the edge, a long-haired young man with glasses turned toward him, holding an AR-15 rifle. The officer dropped back to the ground, the Butler County sheriff told Reuters.
Crooks, an introverted 20-year-old computer whiz who had just accepted a college engineering degree, turned back to face his target, who was standing about 120 yards away. He fired several shots at Trump, hitting the former president’s ear, killing one bystander and wounding two others before Secret Service snipers in a nearby building killed him with return fire.
This account of the first attempted assassination of a U.S. president since 1981 is based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including law enforcement officials, Crooks’ schoolmates and witnesses who attended the rally, as well as public records and newspaper reports.
According to a Reuters photographer at the rally, Crooks fired his rifle at about 6:10 p.m. Trump winced and grabbed his right ear. Secret Service agents subdued the former president and some of his supporters ran for cover. A bullet struck what appeared to be the hydraulic line of a forklift carrying a bank of speakers on the right side of the stage. Fluid sprayed across the crowd and the forklift’s arm collapsed. Screams erupted on the left side where an audience member had been fatally struck.
As Secret Service agents attacked the former president, some of his supporters tried to run for safety. Others grabbed children and rushed to the gate.
“The crowd was not what you would expect from a crowd that had just witnessed something like this,” said Saurabh Sharma, a Trump supporter sitting in the front row. “Everyone was very quiet. A couple of women were crying. They said, you know, ‘I can’t believe they tried to kill him.'”
Four days after the assassination, a coherent picture of the moments leading up to the attack emerged. But Crooks’ ideology and his motives for firing the shot remained a mystery.
An FBI review of Crooks’ phone found that he had searched for pictures of President Joe Biden and Trump, as well as other famous people, in the days before the shooting, the New York Times reported Wednesday, citing U.S. lawmakers briefed on the police investigation.
The crooks searched for dates of Trump’s public appearances and the Democratic National Convention, the report said. He also searched his phone for “major depressive disorder,” the Times said. Reuters could not independently confirm the report.
The shooting came amid a years-long increase in political violence and threats in the United States. When that violence turns deadly, it is more likely to be carried out by far-right forces, according to a Reuters analysis published last year. But the ideological motivation behind Saturday’s attack remains unclear.
Politically divided city
Crooks seemed to have a bright future ahead of him, said two people who knew him at Community College of Allegheny County, where he earned his two-year associate’s degree in engineering in May.
A college lecturer told Reuters she had reviewed his assignments this week and was baffled that a conscientious student who had distinguished himself by going “above and beyond” could have become a murderer.
The teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, said his homework was well thought out and his emails polite. He excelled at an assignment to redesign a toy for people with disabilities. “He made a chess set for the blind. He 3D printed it. He put Braille on it. He talked to experts in the field,” she recalls. “He really put a lot of effort into it.”
Crooks made less of an impression on his fellow students. Samuel Strotman, also enrolled in CCAC’s engineering program, took two online courses with Crooks. Strotman said Crooks never spoke in lectures and kept his camera turned off.
A college staff member who knew Crooks said he was quiet but friendly. “It’s just very, very, very unexpected,” the staff member said. Crooks seemed interested in a career as a mechanical engineer, the staff member said.
The college closed its engineering program on June 30. Crooks had planned to continue his engineering studies at nearby Robert Morris University, that university confirmed.
Most recently, he worked as a dietitian in a nursing home, where he “performed his work without complacency,” the center said. The job was near his home in Bethel Park, a middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh, where he had lived in a modest brick house with his parents and older sister.
At Bethel Park High School, where he graduated in 2022, he kept a low profile, according to classmates. A former classmate told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Crooks expressed conservative views in a history class while other students leaned more liberal. Others said his views were never obvious. His photo was missing from his senior yearbook, his name listed under “not pictured.” He enjoyed gaming and building computers, a classmate told Reuters.
Crooks’ town of Bethel Park is divided almost along the political center of America. In the 2020 election, Trump won a narrow lead of 65 votes in the district of about 33,000 residents, results show.
The political divide was also evident in the Crooks household. Thomas was a registered Republican. His father is a Libertarian and his mother is a Democrat, voter registration records show. Both are social workers. When Crooks was 17, he donated $15 to a political action committee designated for a Democratic turnout group, federal election data shows.
His school counselor, Jim Knapp, who retired in 2022, said Crooks rarely caught his attention because he wasn’t a “needy guy.” Knapp would occasionally check on him at lunch because he was sitting alone. “I said, ‘Would you like to sit with someone?’ And he said, ‘No, I’m fine on my own,'” Knapp recalled.
Former high school classmate Max Rich said Crooks was shy and “never seemed like the type” to commit such acts of violence. He left virtually no digital trace. He spent time on Discord, a gaming platform, but the company said it found “no evidence that it was used to plan this incident, promote violence or discuss his political views.”
Crooks was a member of the local Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, a gun club. When he was killed, he was wearing a T-shirt advertising “Demolition Ranch,” a YouTube channel for gun enthusiasts. After the shooting, Matt Carriker, a Texas veterinarian who runs the Demolition Ranch channel, posted a video on X saying he was “shocked and confused” to learn Crooks was wearing his channel’s merchandise. “We’re keeping politics out of this,” he said, adding that he did not know Crooks and had never met or communicated with him.
Homemade bombs and ammunition
Crooks appear to have spent at least some time preparing for the Trump event. On the day of the rally, he bought ammunition, stopping at a gun store in his hometown of Bethel Park to pick up 50 rounds, according to a joint bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, which is leading the investigation.
He built three homemade bombs – two of which were found in his car and another in his house, according to the bulletin seen by Reuters. In previous months, the bulletin said, Crooks had “received several packages, including some marked as potentially hazardous material.”
An Allegheny County Police Department bomb disposal vehicle heads to the home of bombing suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks on July 14, 2024. Police said three homemade bombs were found – two in his car and another in his home. (Reuters)
At the rally, Crooks caught the attention of local police as he paced the grounds before Trump took the stage. An officer reported a suspicious person and snapped a photo that was distributed electronically to other officers on site, according to Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe, a Trump supporter who was sitting near the front of the rally as a special guest.
By the time two Butler Township police officers responded to the call, people in the crowd had already noticed a man on the roof. Some were shouting that he had a gun, according to video of the crowd obtained by Reuters. Slupe told Reuters that the officer who initially pulled himself up onto the roof didn’t have time to draw his gun when Crooks turned toward him, leaving him no choice but to drop back to the ground.
Secret Service officials have said their agency was responsible for securing the area within the event’s security perimeter; the building Crooks used was just outside. However, some former agency officials and other security experts have disputed that claim, arguing that buildings within direct line of sight and firing range of the former president should be searched and constantly monitored by Secret Service sniper teams.
Local authorities reacted angrily to the suggestion that the city or county police were responsible for securing the building.
“Butler Township Police did not have any security forces for this incident,” Butler Township Commissioner Edward Natali wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday, noting that the township had seven officers on the scene solely for traffic duty. Although the officer who confronted Crooks on the roof had to back away, he added, “the encounter most likely forced the shooter to fire his shots more quickly.”