BETHEL PARK, Pa. — It’s been almost nine months since a seemingly mild-mannered 20-year-old attempted to assassinate then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a rally in Butler.
And we still have no good reason why.
Sources told The Post the FBI has obstructed efforts to solve the mystery of why Thomas Matthew Crooks, who left no manifesto, did what he did. It’s left local law enforcement as well as Crooks’ former friends, classmates and teachers frustrated.
Those who may know — Crooks’ parents, Matthew and Mary — have refused all interviews and remain in their small, three-bedroom home here, sealed off from the world like hermits. Neighbors say they only leave the house at 3 a.m. to buy groceries.
“By the way, why do we know nothing about that guy in Butler?” Elon Musk yelled out to the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, before warning that FBI Director “Kash [Patel] is going to get to the bottom of it.”
A veteran private investigator from Erie, Pa., who was hired shortly after the fateful July 13 event at the Butler rally to look into Crooks by a private client, told The Post he believes a “criminal network” was operating with him at the time of the assassination attempt, is still in existence and still wants to kill President Trump.
Doug Hagmann, whose team of six other investigators have been working the case for months and have interviewed more than 100 people, said they also conducted extensive geofencing analysis of cellphones and tablets not belonging to Crooks that were found with him at his home, at the rifle range where he took target practice, at the rally and at Bethel Park High School, where he graduated in 2022.
“We don’t think he acted alone,” Hagmann told The Post. “This took a lot of coordination. In my view, Crooks was handled by more than one individual and he was used for this [assassination attempt]. And I wouldn’t preclude the possibility that there were people at the rally itself helping him.”
Hagmann said one of the electronic devices geolocated with Crooks at several different places at the time of the shooting is still pinging today — at Bethel Park High School.
Crooks, perched on a rooftop 130 yards away, opened fire onto the main stage in Butler minutes after Trump, 78, mounted it to warm up the crowd.
He fired eight shots, striking the former president in the right ear; killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore, 50, and seriously wounding two others, David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 54.
The autopsy report indicates Crooks was pronounced dead at 6:25 p.m. July 13 from a gunshot wound to the head by a counter-sniper.
Hagmann said he was personally escorted to the Butler County line and told to leave twice during the course of his team’s investigation. The people who did so were either federal agents or some type of private security.
He added that “one can assist in an operation like this by omission or standing down. There are people still out there involved in this case that need to be brought to justice.”
FBI officials who served under President Joe Biden accessed Crooks’ phone, computer and his encrypted messaging apps in Belgium, New Zealand and Germany, according to current national security adviser Mike Waltz, a former GOP congressman. However, they have been very tight-lipped about what they found.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who has also been investigating Crooks’ assassination attempt for months, has not seen Hagmann’s geofencing data but downplayed their significance. He told The Post he believes Crooks acted alone and there was no conspiracy. However, he also said the FBI continually obstructed his investigation.
His report into what he calls “J13” was published Dec. 5 as part of the bipartisan task force on the attempted assassination.
But Higgins admitted that even after months of his granular, boots-on-the-ground research — including exhaustive ballistics examinations, trips to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, and lengthy conversations with the high-profile Pittsburgh law firm representing Crooks’ parents — he has only one theory.
He thinks Crooks must have been on some sort of prescription drug that made him, in Higgins’ words, “go crazy.”
But the Pittsburgh County medical examiner, strangely, did not perform toxicological tests for pharmaceuticals — or at least did not include them in the autopsy report. Even more oddly, Crooks’ body was released to his parents eight days after the shooting without most officials involved the investigation knowing — and was promptly cremated.
“Thomas Crooks was a brilliant engineering student who was on a path to success,” Higgins said, noting that Crooks had been accepted and was given a scholarship to Robert Morris University, where he would be starting in the fall of 2024.
“Something happened to make him go crazy and that’s why I think it might have been pharmaceuticals. He performed an attempted assassination and he was committed all the way through — to death. He was not acting erratic but he was a wild lunatic at the same time, incredibly calculating and incredibly smart.”
But terms like “wild lunatic” and “incredibly calculating” are not adjectives that any of the former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends whom The Post interviewed during a week in the Bethel Park area used to describe Crooks.
Instead, the people who knew him in these snowy, industrial mill and mining towns-turned-suburbs just south of Pittsburgh said they were shocked and devastated when they learned it was Crooks who shot Trump.
Many of them said that the narrative about Crooks in the media in the first days after the shooting — that he was a troubled loner, wore military fatigues and camo clothing, threatened to shoot up his high school in 2019 and was rejected by his school’s rifle club — were all lies.
“He was my little buddy,” teacher Xavier Harmon, 48, who had Crooks in his computer technology class at Steel Center for Career and Technical Education for two years, told The Post last week.
“I just didn’t believe it when I heard it. Tom was the quirky, funny little guy who also loved to excel in class. When he was finished, he’d always go back and help his classmates. He was very intelligent.”
Harmon and other teachers both from his high school and at the Community College of Allegheny County, where he graduated in 2024 with an engineering degree, said there was no indication Crooks was on any type of substance — legal or illegal.
Crooks was a gifted student with nearly straight As all through high school and college. He scored a total of 1530 out of a possible 1600 score on his SATs, according to records.
“I don’t think he set out to kill the president,” Harmon said. “My guess is, he messed with the wrong individuals about what they were going to do and it was different from what he thought it was going to be. Anyone planning to do this would leave some sort of breadcrumbs. But there’s nothing — no paperwork, no itinerary, no even [him] going to websites to [research].”
Jim Knapp, who was a longtime guidance counselor and sports coach at Bethel Park High School before his recent retirement, knew Crooks’ parents and older sister, Katie, 23, before he knew Thomas.
“He was a middle-of-the-road young man from a typical Bethel Park-type family,” Knapp told The Post. “Neither Thomas or Katie fit the profile of a troubled kid and their parents didn’t seem strange, either. Tom was a nice kid. He stuck to himself a lot but he also had friends.”
Knapp, a devout Catholic, says “something happened” to Crooks between the time he graduated from high school in 2022 and the shooting 18 months later.
“I believe evil exists in the world and the devil caused him to snap. Something got into his brain and controlled it. The devil fed on him and got him, hook, line and sinker.”
Neighbors on the quiet street where Crooks’ parents still live said the family were never considered strange or sinister.
“He was nerdy but nice,” Kelly Little, 38, who lives across the street and whose son went to high school with Crooks, told The Post.
Crooks’ parents, Matthew, 54, and Mary, 53, are both licensed social workers. Higgins said their lawyer tried to convince them to speak to him but they declined. Mary is visually impaired.
The couple did not answer when The Post knocked on their door.
“We never see them,” a neighbor who did not want to be identified told The Post. “They come out to do their grocery shopping at 3 am. It’s eerie. But it frightened me to death at the time. I thought, how could they not know what their son was up to in that house?”
Sister Katie, who works as a janitor at a nearby school, lives in a drab apartment building about a mile away. Two older men came to the door of the building when The Post arrived, saying she did not want to be disturbed and warning a reporter, “The story is dead. Remember that.”
Crooks’ friend from his high school economics class, Mark Sigaroos, told The Post that the case “still baffles me now.”
“It’s presented like an open-and-shut case like, ‘Oh, he went crazy’ but it doesn’t really add up. It’s like JFK. Do we think we’ve become so modern that wouldn’t happen again?”
Some believe Crooks was radicalized while at Community College of Allegheny County, but his academic adviser Todd Landree doubts it. He remembers Crooks as being smart and being impressed with one of his assignments, a chess project he printed out in 3-D so blind people could play chess, which he said was “fantastic.”
Even though Higgins has been named chairman of a new subcommittee that will continue the shooting investigation, Harmon doubts the truth will ever come out.
“I just want everybody to understand who Thomas really was and the individual I knew,” he said. “The monster being created is not the individual who sat in my classroom for two years. I’m going to focus my heart and my mind on that young man.”"
