Latest news with #ThomasCrooks
New York Times
12 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Times
The Quiet Unraveling of the Man Who Almost Killed Trump
In 2022, Thomas Crooks was a soft-spoken community college student who made speeches like this one for class. In 2022, Thomas Crooks was a soft-spoken community college student who made speeches like this one for class. Less than two years later, he mounted a roof and fired eight bullets toward Donald J. Trump. Less than two years later, he mounted a roof and fired eight bullets toward Donald J. Trump. Photograph: Kristian Thacker for The New York Times. Supported by Thomas Crooks was acting strangely. Sometimes he danced around his bedroom late into the night. Other times, he talked to himself with his hands waving around. These unusual behaviors intensified last summer, after he graduated with high honors from a community college. He also visited a shooting range, grew out his thin brown hair and searched online for 'major depressive disorder' and 'depression crisis.' His father noticed the shift — mental health problems ran in the family. On the afternoon of July 13, Mr. Crooks told his parents he was heading to the range and left home with a rifle. Hours later, he mounted a roof at a presidential campaign rally in western Pennsylvania and tried to assassinate Donald J. Trump. That scene has been etched into American history. After a bullet grazed Mr. Trump's ear, he lifted his blood-streaked face, pumped his fist and shouted the words: 'Fight! Fight! Fight!' Mr. Trump has said that God saved him in order to save America, and the White House recently unveiled a statue in the Oval Office commemorating the moment. The near miss revealed alarming security lapses that allowed an amateur marksman barely out of his teens to fire at a former president less than 500 feet away. And it galvanized support for Mr. Trump, inspiring voters who saw him as a righteous hero triumphing in the face of smear campaigns, relentless prosecutions and even an attempt on his life. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Haunting new emails show very different side to Thomas Crooks, the gunman who shot Trump at Pennsylvania rally
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old Pennsylvanian who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in July, was in the process of designing a bomb in the months leading up to the shooting. Crooks, 20, killed two and shot Trump in the ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024. As part of the FBI investigation into Crooks - who top officials Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have said was not part of a foreign plot - has revealed views inside the mind of the would-be assassin. At the time, Crooks was working on applications to a four-year college from community college to get a degree in engineering. However, using an encrypted email account, he also ordered over two gallons of nitromethane from online retailer Hyperfuels, CBS News reported. An email obtained shows Crooks, 12 days after his order, wondering why it hadn't shipped. 'Hello, my name is Thomas. I placed an order on your website on January 19. I have not received any updates of the order shipping out yet and I was wondering if you still have it and when I can expect it to come,' he wrote on January 31, 2024 at 7:44am. The feds were able to access his email because he sent it from an account tied to Community College of Allegheny County where he attended. However, of the hundreds of emails from his college account that have been viewed, very little else reveals much about the shooting but does give a look at the life Crooks was living. One missive shows Crooks emailing his professor asking if he can only bring two or three adults to a presentation that asked him to bring five. 'I do not have access to any other adults' aside from his parents and his sister, he writes. Otherwise, Crooks is painted as an A-level student who professes his enjoyment for the fall season and stayed in contact with his professors. 'It's sad that he had so much promise and he chose to do this. It's just very difficult to understand where it came from,' Patricia Thompson, one of his professors, said. Online theories swirled that Crooks was part of a large foreign-influenced plot to take out the Republican before the 2024 presidential election, which he went on to win. Crooks was on top of a nearby building a few hundred feet from where Trump was speaking that day, crouched down with an AR-15 rifle. He was able to fire eight rounds in Trump's direction less than 150 yards from where the former president was speaking. Crooks was killed by counter snipers who took him out before he was able to reap more damage at the Trump rally. A series of failures by the U.S. Secret Service ultimately allowed would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks to successfully land a shot in Donald Trump 's right ear, a new report reveals. One troubling finding from the bipartisan Senate investigation was how technical issues downed Secret Service drones during the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The agent responsible for overseeing the Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) called a toll free 888 tech support hotline 'to start troubleshooting with the company.' There were no backups. It took several hours to get the drones back up and running – and the agent responsible for the drone operations only had three months of experience with the equipment. The report released on Wednesday concluded that the failures ahead of the rally were 'foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt that day.'
CBS News
23-05-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Trump shooter Thomas Crooks' emails reveal a student dreaming of a bright future. And contemplating a violent attack.
Thomas Matthew Crooks had a lot on his mind in January 2024. The 20-year-old who, six months later, would open fire at President Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally — striking his ear and killing an audience member — was busy polishing his applications to transfer from community college to a four-year engineering program. Crooks was gathering transcripts and asking friends to review his personal statement. He was also designing a bomb. He ordered more than two gallons of nitromethane from an online speciality fuel retailer using an encrypted email account, documents obtained by CBS News show. Twelve days later Crooks' purchase hadn't shipped and he wanted to know why. "Hello, my name is Thomas. I placed an order on your website on January 19. I have not received any updates of the order shipping out yet and I was wondering if you still have it and when I can expect it to come," Crooks emailed the retailer, Hyperfuels, at 7:44 a.m. on Jan. 31, 2024. Email obtained by CBS News Crooks used his community college email account to inquire about shipping, one of the few operational missteps that has allowed for a rare look into the dark side of this ambitious young student. Two weeks after the nitromethane email, on Feb. 13, 2024, Crooks' focus returned to his academic future, planning a video call he labeled, "Proofread my Pitt personal essay with friends prior to class." A student who went "above and beyond" Very little is known about how or why Thomas Crooks set out to shoot then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Now, emails, essays and other documents reviewed by CBS News are offering a fresh glimpse into the mind of a young man who was simultaneously planning two irreconcilable futures. In one, Crooks continues his engineering studies, for which he was lauded by professors for his work ethic, progress and class contributions. In the other, he hurtles toward an act that he must have known would end in either prison or — as it did on July 13, 2024 — his death. He was a meticulous and motivated student, attending community college after scoring 1530 on the SATs, records show. He told an adviser he was starting at the school to save money before transferring. Thomas Matthew Crooks at his high school graduation Bethel Park School District via AP In the hundreds of college emails obtained by CBS News, Crooks rarely veers into personal territory, with a few exceptions. When an upcoming assignment required the presence of five adults, he asked the professor if it would be OK if he only brought two or three. Crooks said that other than his sister and parents, he did "not have access to any other adults." Crooks wrote a passage on why his favorite season is fall in an essay submitted on Jan. 30, the day before he contacted Hyperfuels. The essay, penned in various colors, mused on his love for football and his two favorite holidays, Halloween and Thanksgiving. He waxed poetic about the fall weather and asked, "who doesn't love the changing color of the leaves?" Crooks took his classwork seriously, routinely contacting professors to protest if he wasn't satisfied with his grades. After taking a math exam in which he errantly mislabeled a variable, Crooks asked if he could get the point back. The teacher agreed to give him 75% credit for the question. "Sounds good," Crooks replied. "That should be enough to get me an A." Crooks did A-level work in most of his courses, according to his transcript. Emails show professors were often impressed by his dedication. "Thanks again for your contribution to the class this term — wouldn't've been the same without you!" wrote an English professor in December 2022. One project in particular wowed professors in the engineering department. Crooks, whose mother is visually impaired, designed and 3D-printed a unique chessboard. The prototype included Braille labeling along the rows and columns, and alternating "raised squares with peg-holes to prevent the pieces from being knocked over," as Crooks described it. Former engineering professor Todd Landree recalls the small department's staff marveling at the project. "It was above and beyond what anybody expected," Landree said. Patricia Thompson, who taught the class, said she still thinks about Crooks' project. She also described it as "above and beyond" expectations. "It's sad that he had so much promise and he chose to do this. It's just very difficult to understand where it came from," Thompson said. A skeptic of government's "lofty promises" Crooks was focused on engineering and computing while at the community college, but a handful of written assignments show hints of a deep skepticism of the federal government and corporations. A prompt asking students to consider whether engineers involved in NASA's 1986 Challenger disaster acted ethically yielded a skeptical reply. Crooks blamed NASA's administrators, who in pushing for the ill-fated launch "were trying to live up to the lofty promises they made to Congress which they were never going to be able to fulfill," he wrote. For a 2022 English assignment, Crooks wrote about George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant." Crooks called the essay "a powerful allegory warning against adopting imperialistic policies." "The writing maintains its significance as the themes in it apply to every form of tyrannical government many of which still exist today, and continue to send young men, much like Orwell, to carry out the 'dirty work of Empire,' Crooks wrote. Crooks wrote about Mr. Trump at least once. The essay was called "Why Nuclear Energy is the Key to a Cleaner Future," and Crooks briefly touched on the proliferation of nuclear weapons, criticizing a decision Mr. Trump made during his first term. "To prevent hostile nations from acquiring nuclear technology, America and its allies can stop sales of the technology to those nations and can enter into mutually beneficial agreements like the Iran deal, which effectively halted that nations (sic) nuclear program until President Trump withdrew from it," Crooks wrote. His writing also, at least once, focused in part on then-President Biden. Crooks reviewed a 2021 opinion column that ran in The Washington Post, concluding that it persuasively argued against Mr. Biden's support for tuition-free community college. "Liberals also tend to be in favor of free community college and, in fact, free college in general," Crooks wrote. "So it is very interesting to see an author try to convince the other side using their pre-exisiting (sic) political concerns rather than trying to impress their own on to them" While Crooks showed an advanced ability to reason and persuade, he often struggled with spelling and grammar errors. Several essays and work assignments were returned to him asking him to make corrections to his work. A grand jury with a dead suspect The nitromethane purchase invoice lists a separate email account from a Belgium-based service that offers end-to-end encryption. FBI Pittsburgh Special Agent in Charge Kevin Rojek told reporters in August that Crooks had researched "nitromethane, and other materials consistent with the manufacturing of explosive devices." Rojek indicated agents accessed multiple overseas-based encrypted email accounts used by Crooks, who did not use explosives during his attack. A Hyperfuels employee, asked about Crooks' purchase last year, said the company was "aware of the whole situation." The company's president did not respond to phone or text messages. Crooks' transcript and certain other academic records were first made public by America First Legal, a nonprofit founded by Stephen Miller, a longtime aide to Mr. Trump who is now White House deputy chief of staff. Pennsylvania lawyer Wally Zimolong pursued the records on America First Legal's behalf, winning an open records fight that paved the way for their release last year. Among his discoveries was the little-known federal grand jury that subpoenaed the community college and received Crooks' emails and essays. Zimolong provided CBS News with records related to the grand jury's subpoena and Crooks' transcripts. A letter from a Justice Department official to the college on July 24, 2024, confirmed the subpoena related to "an active FBI criminal investigation." Federal grand juries are typically empaneled to determine probable cause to indict a person for a crime, but Crooks — the only known suspect — had been dead for 11 days at that point. "I think it raises a lot of important questions. Were they investigating anyone else? Are they still investigating?" Zimolong asked. He said it adds to the mystery surrounding the young man who seemed determined to continue with college until the day he climbed onto the roof of a building in Butler, Pennsylvania, and began firing. "A year later we still don't know enough," Zimolong said.
