Thomas Matthew Crooks: The registered Republican and gun lover who shot Trump

The FBI has named the man who shot Donald Trump as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican from Pennsylvania.

The first pictures of the gunman, taken from his high school yearbook have now emerged. Crooks, wearing a grey shirt with the American flag on it smiles at the camera in the photo from Bethel Park High School.

Crooks was reportedly wearing a T-shirt bearing the emblem of a pro-gun YouTube channel when he was killed on Saturday by a special forces sniper after firing three shots at the former US president.

One shot grazed Trump’s ear, spraying blood across his face. A man sitting behind Trump was shot and died and two other people were badly injured.

The FBI said that it regarded Crooks as carrying out “an assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump”.

“This remains an active and ongoing investigation,” it said.

Suspects home raided

Reports said that heavily armed US security agents have raided Crooks’ home in Bethel Park on the edge of Pittsburgh, roughly an hour’s drive south of Butler, the small and hard-up post-industrial town where he tried to kill Trump.

The FBI said that Crooks was not carrying any identification when he made the assassination attempt and had to be identified using DNA samples.

“We don’t currently have an identified motive, although our investigators are working tirelessly to attempt to identify what that motive was,” said Kevin Rojek, an FBI Pittsburgh special agent.

AR-15 semi-automatic rifle recovered

Crooks shot at Trump from the roof of a shed outside the security cordon thrown up around the rally in a park in central Butler at around 6.15pm local time, shortly after the former US president had started speaking.

Witnesses said Crooks “bear crawled” across a rooftop less than 100m away from Trump, the Republican presidential candidate frontrunner. They said that Crooks then spent two or three minutes steadying himself, before taking aim and firing at Trump.

US security forces said that they had recovered an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle lying by Crooks’ body. AR-15 semi-automatic rifles have been used in several mass shootings in the US and have become the focus of the gun debate.

Photos also showed a member of the US security forces standing over Crooks’ body. Crooks was wearing beige cargo-style shorts and a grey T-shirt bearing the logo of a pro-gun YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch.

A registered Republican

Unconfirmed videos and photos on the internet showed Crooks to be a tall, slender, white man who wore glasses and had long sandy-brown hair.

Voter-registration data showed that Crooks was a registered Republican voter but on Jan 20 2021, two weeks after pro-Trump alt-Right supporters stormed the White House, Crooks gave $15 to a grassroots Democratic group.

Crooks didn’t have a criminal record. A video purportedly showing him wearing a black gown as he graduated from the Bethel Park High School in 2022 was circulating on social media.

The Telegraph has not been able to verity the footage.

Crook’s father told CNN he was trying to find out “what the hell” was going on but that he would talk to law enforcement before speaking about his son.

Open-source intelligence analysts reported that Crooks didn’t appear to use mainstream social media channels such as Facebook or Instagram and had an almost negligible internet footprint, which is highly unusual for a 20-year-old. Instead, analysts said that Crooks corresponded with friends and associates on a Discord server that they were now trying to access.

Discord servers are restricted ring-fenced sections of the internet. They are often used by gaming groups and communities as secure chat rooms but are also used by fringe organisations to push their ideologies and discuss wild conspiracy theories and plots.

Popular pro-gun channel

The Demolition Ranch YouTube is one of the most popular pro-gun channels in the US. It has nearly 12 million subscribers and is a mix of instructional videos of clients learning how to shoot at the Demolition Ranch range in Texas and middle-aged men glorifying sniper rifles.

One website selling Demolition Ranch t-shirts, including the one that Crooks was wearing, said that people wore it as a “testament to the fun, educational, and supportive nature” of the channel. Anybody can buy the Demolition Ranch merchandise.

“This shirt is more than just apparel; it’s a statement of unity and shared passion for firearms and the Second Amendment,” the website selling the t-shirts said.

The Second Amendment is the clause in the US constitution that allows people to carry weapons and is the focus of furious debate.

The star of the Demolition Ranch channel is Matt Carriker, a 38-year-old father of three and a trained vet, who is known for rescuing stray and injured cats and dogs.

His personal Instagram account has 1.4 million subscribers and is filled with more photos of guns and cars, as well as family snaps from ski holidays and marathon training. There doesn’t appear to be any political slogans on the account.

Mr Carriker reposted the photo of members of the US security forces standing over Crooks’ dead body, wearing the grey Demolition Ranch t-shirt.

“What the hell?” he wrote underneath the photo.

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