ANALYSIS – A very good shot. Initial reporting, including some of mine, implied the young man who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump was a bullied kid with a high school education and a grudge.
However, new details have surfaced showing that Thomas Matthew Crooks was highly intelligent, studied engineering at a local college and conducted thorough preparations for his deadly attack on Trump.
New information from his former high school, Bethel Park School, also refutes stories that Crooks was bullied at school and tried out for the school rifle team.
Much of the new information paints a much more complex picture of the deadly shooter and how he outwitted law enforcement to take his fateful shots.
First, he was much more than just a simple high school graduate. Crooks spent the past two years getting his engineering degree at the Community College of Allegheny County, where he impressed classmates with his mastery of the subject.
He was also reportedly a techno-nerd fascinated by high-tech topics such as AI. He was planning to transfer to a local university to get his four-year degree in mechanical engineering.
In an updated statement, the school district also issued a comment titled “correcting the record,” which disputed several claims about the gunman.
It said that: “It has been reported that Thomas Crooks was a member of the Bethel Park High School rifle team or tried out for it but was dismissed due to poor performance or because the coach had character concerns. Thomas Crooks was never a member of the school’s rifle team, and we have no record of him trying out,” the statement reads.
The school added:
The coach of the team, according to the school, does not have any memory of meeting Mr. Crooks. The suspect may have “informally attended a practice, took a shot, and never returned,” but the school does not “have any record of that happening,” according to the statement.
Multiple classmates and students who knew Mr. Crooks, 20, told media outlets in the past week that he was bullied and suggested that it may have played a role in the assassination attempt.
However, the school district contends that those claims are a “painful misconception.” District records of Mr. Crooks’s academic performance, disciplinary history, attendance, and more suggest that he “excelled academically, regularly attended school, and had no disciplinary incidents, including those related to bullying or threats,” the school district stated.
Finally, the school said: “Mr. Crooks was known as a quiet, bright young man who generally got along with his teachers and classmates.”
And while a registered Republican, he donated to a left-wing group on the day of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. His father was an independent and mother a Democrat.
Meanwhile, a criminal profiler said Thomas Matthew Crooks was likely not politically motivated, but an “organized thinker.”
Keith Howard, the chief deputy of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia and a criminal profiler, told Fox News Digital that the shooting of Trump was not a random act of violence or specifically anti-Trump.
Howard noted: “…if we do this behavioral analysis, if he’s searching for something to be infamous, then when he’s searching for the Trump rallies and the Democratic National Convention, and he sees that one is going to be in his backyard, now all his actions have come into place.”
Crooks’ organized thinking is reinforced by the extensive preparations Crooks took leading up to the shooting. From shooting lessons and practice to reconnaissance with a drone, the gunman was extremely thorough. And a good shot.
He and his father were reportedly part of a club of long-distance shooters.
Air Force veteran Bill Jenkins, 62, was on the range at Keystone Shooting Centre in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, with Crooks less than a month before he was taken out by a Secret Service Counter Sniper after trying to kill Trump.
The New York Post reported:
“The course went on for three hours and I could see this kid was confident with guns. When we went to the range he started shooting straight away,” Jenkins told the outlet. “It seemed like he had experience with weapons.”
Crooks took his own 9mm pistol to the range.
Later, he registered for Trump’s rally on July 7, a few days after the campaign announced it, and searched for information about the vicinity.
In addition to numerous photos and other publicly available information about the venue Trump would be speaking at, Crooks did his own reconnaissance or site survey before the shooting, right up to the last minute.
He reportedly flew a drone over the rally site a few hours before Trump took the stage. The camera drone made by DJI allowed Crooks to get an overhead view that likely helped him plan his attack.
He flew his drone on a programmed flight path to scour the farm show grounds in a Western Pennsylvania town. This was better than the Secret Service, which reportedly never flew a drone at the site.
A drone and drone equipment were recovered from Crooks’ vehicle. Federal authorities such as the FAA regularly ban drones over areas they are securing.
On the day of the shooting, he purchased a ladder at Home Depot and 50 rounds of ammunition at a gun store and headed to the farm show grounds. He also had homemade explosives in his car along with a remote detonator on himself, he may have planned to use as a distraction.
According to The Post, he rode his bicycle around the Butler, Pennsylvania location more than 40 minutes before the shooting, and ditched it in full view of cops and a crowd before he climbed on top of a roof and opened fire.
Law enforcement sources said Crooks was identified as “suspicious” an hour before the shooting when an officer spotted Crooks using a rangefinder similar to binoculars used by hunters and target shooters to measure distances for long-range shots nearly an hour before Trump took the stage.
The Secret Service later deemed him a “threat” 10 minutes prior to Trump going on stage.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Every indication is that both the USSS and the police were aware of his presence and had ample opportunity to stop him in advance. This indicates a really frightening problem with the very organizations charged with protection. Are they both as corrupt as the Biden FBI?
So, what we really have here is not a “simple high school graduate”, but a graduate engineer a degreed individual. One of America’s worthless communist indoctrinated college grads. The typical far left nut job touted by academia as an asset to society. A murderer!
If Crooks was deemed as a threat then why in the hell didn’t someone try to apprehend him? I agree with many of Americans that this was an attempt to get rid of Donald Trump and everything that followed this failed assassination is just a cover-up, it’s our so-called government trying to lie to us again as they do so many occasions, tell the truth!