Thomas Matthew Crooks: Registered Republican and gun lover who shot Trump

The man who shot Donald Trump has been unmasked as a 20-year-old registered Republican who was bullied at school and had an obsession with guns.

Classmates described Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by a special forces sniper after firing from a nearby roof at the former US president during a Pennsylvania rally, as an “outcast” who was relentlessly teased about his appearance.

A car belonging to the gunman was found on Sunday parked near the rally laden with explosives.

Bomb-making materials were also discovered at his family home after heavily-armed US security agents carried out a raid on the property in Bethel Park, a village about an hour’s drive south of Butler, the small and hard-up post-industrial town where he tried to shot Trump.

Crooks was reportedly wearing a T-shirt bearing the emblem of a pro-gun YouTube channel when he carried out the assassination attempt by firing a volley of bullets towards the stage a few minutes after Trump began speaking.

Crooks opened fire while the former US president was addressing a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, leaving one audience member dead and two others badly hurt.

One shot grazed Trump’s ear, spraying blood across his face. Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old father of two who was 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.

The Pentagon confirmed that Crooks did not have any military ties.

“We’ve confirmed with each of the military service branches that there is no military service affiliation for the suspect with that name or date of birth in any branch, active or reserve component in their respective databases,” Pentagon spokesman Maj Gen Patrick S Ryder said.

Law enforcement sources said they believed the weapon used to shoot Trump was purchased by Crook’s father who bought a weapon at least six months ago.

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 publicly.

The gunman, who reportedly worked in a nursing home, did not have a criminal history reflected in Pennsylvania’s public court records, and officials said they had not identified a motive.

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 he 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 (£11.80) to a grassroots Democratic group.

A bespeckled Crooks, who was pictured in his Bethel Park High School yearbook photo wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the American flag, was described by former classmates as an “outcast” who was bullied daily.

“He was bullied almost everyday. He would sit alone at lunch. I mean, he was just an outcast, and you know how kids are nowadays”, one former pupil told NBC.

“They go see someone like that and target him because they think it’s funny or whatever. It’s the best way I can describe it. And honestly, it’s kinda sad. I don’t want to say this is what provoked it, but you never know.

“He was bullied so much. So much [in high school]. They just made fun, for the way he dressed, his appearance.”

Sarah D’Angelo, a former classmate of Crooks at Bethel Park High School, told the Wall Street Journal the gunman Crooks had never appeared political at school.

“He never outwardly spoke about his political views or how much he hated Trump or anything,” she said.

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.

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 6.15 pm local time, shortly after the former US president had started speaking.

Witnesses said Crooks “bear crawled” across a rooftop less than 100 metres 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 Crook’s 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.

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

Open-source intelligence analysts reported that Crooks did not 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 which 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.

The Demolition Ranch YouTube channel 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.

Crooks appeared to have featured in a TV advert for the BlackRock finance company filmed at Bethel Park High School and broadcast in 2023.

In the advert promoting teachers’ retirement plans, a boy who appears to be Crooks was sat in one of the classrooms during an economics lesson.

On its website, Bethel Park High School promotes itself as a traditional school in an affluent middle-class Pittsburgh suburb that has a “distinguished alumni”.

Crooks tried out for his school’s rifle team but failed to make it because he was a “comically bad shot” and made jokes deemed inappropriate with firearms around, two former classmates told The New York Post.

He missed his target by close to 20ft, Jameson Murphy said.

“He tried out…and was such a comically bad shot he was unable to make the team and left after the first day,” he added.

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