Investigators still don’t know why Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican, tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump, despite accessing his phone, car and home.
FBI officials spent Monday morning speaking with neighbors and those that knew Crooks, a 20-year-old who lived in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh’s WTAE reported.
Authorities have also accessed Crooks’ phone and social media accounts, but say they have not found anything online that points to a motive.
“This guy is one of these almost invisible people that are out there,” former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary told NBC News. “They’re not on social media. They’re not screaming or yelling about this or that. They’re ruminating about it internally — whatever it might be. And they just decide to do this, which scares the hell out of all of us in law enforcement.”
Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022 and later attended Community College of Allegheny County. He worked as a dietary aide at a Bethel Park nursing home.
Despite once donating $15 to a pro-Democratic Party political action committee in January 2021, Crooks later registered as Republican. Neighbors said they saw pro-Trump signs in the Crooks’ front-yard as recently as a few months ago.
“There absolutely was MAGA-supporting signs for a while,” one of Crooks’ neighbors, Kelly Little, told WTAE. She described him as “a quiet, normal kid.”
Some of Crooks’ high school classmates also described him as “conservative” and expressed their shock at Saturday’s assassination attempt.
“I would almost put money on the fact that I probably had seen him wear a Trump shirt or something along the lines of that beforehand, which is why this is so shocking to me,” Paige Updegraff told Pittsburgh public radio station WESA.
“He definitely was conservative. It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate,” another classmate, Max R. Smith, told told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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