NEW ORLEANS — The FBI has identified Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20 of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania as the subject involved in the assassination attempt of Donald Trump. Crooks is accused of firing on the former president who was speaking at a rally Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Since the shooting, investigators have been hunting for clues as to why Crooks shot into the crowd with an AR-style weapon, injuring Trump and killing one rally-goer.
“So far, remarkably in this case, there haven't been a lot of messages to emerge,” AP Investigative Reporter Jim Mustian said. “We just don’t really know what the motive is yet.”
Mustian is part of a team of journalists reporting on the shooting for the Associated Press. He spoke with some of Crooks’s former classmates at Bethel Park High School.
“I will say the classmates who spoke out yesterday were pretty adamant that this was somebody who had been kind of mistreated in school and was being made fun of at times,” Mustian said. “There is a picture emerging of him of being something of an outcast at the school.”
Dr. Dean Hickman is Chief of Psychiatry at Ochsner Health. He says there were troubled ingredients in Crooks’s background.
“He’s said not to have many friends,” Hickman said. “He’s not part of a friend group. He is bullied. He’s wearing hunter camouflage clothes that’s a target of bullying, but yet that maybe re-reinforces who he wants to be. He’s a pseudo-commando.”
Hickman says it could be Crooks was angry at the world and out to inflict pain.
“Whether it’s revenge or whether it’s notoriety or I’ll show them. It’s just this sense of resentment that the world owes him, and he will go out in a blaze of glory, regrettably.”
The FBI believes Crooks, who had bomb-making materials in his car, drove to the rally and acted alone. Politics, I think haven’t really emerged as a factor yet in this,” Mustian said. “Again, they are still digging into what his potential motive was.”
A Secret Service sniper shot and killed Crooks. His political leanings were not immediately clear.
Records show he was registered as a Republican voter in Pennsylvania, but had previously made a $15 donation to a Democratic-aligned group.