In the early hours of Sunday morning, at approximately 1:34 a.m. EST, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s Pittsburgh Field Office officially identified the Trump shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.
Not much is known about Crooks. Now that the FBI has taken over as the lead federal investigative agency, expect further delays in the investigation’s findings.
Here’s what we were able to confirm as more details come to light:
According to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing corresponding to the shooter’s residential address, a teenage Crooks, then age 17, donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a left-wing voter turnout PAC, through the Democratic donation platform ActBlue on January 20, 2021, the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
In a statement shared with Drop Site, an independent news project of The Intercept’s co-founder Jeremy Scahill, the political action committee said Crooks had sent the donation “in response to an email about tuning into the inauguration.”
“The email address associated with the contribution only made the one contribution and was unsubscribed from our [mailing] lists 2 years ago,” Progressive Turnout Project said.
Minors can legally make campaign contributions within certain limitations, the FEC stipulates.
The upcoming race in November marks when Crooks would have been old enough to vote in a presidential election.
However, according to Pennsylvania voter registration rolls, identifying information matching that of Crooks says he was a registered Republican.
Allegheny County Councilman Dan Grzybek, who represents Bethel Park, said in an interview with The New York Times that Crooks’s mother was a Democrat and his father a Libertarian. “You’ve got a large spattering of different backgrounds and ideals and definitely have a lot of mixed households in Bethel Park,” said Gryzbek, who had previously met Crooks’s parents while canvassing the neighborhood.
Investigators reportedly believe that the rifle Crooks fired several shots from belonged to his father, Matthew Crooks, who allegedly purchased the firearm at least six months ago.
CNN contacted the elder Crooks, but the distraught dad declined to speak publicly about his son, saying he would rather wait until he talked to law enforcement first as he tried to figure out “what the hell is going on.”
In June 2022, Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School, a suburban school district south of Pittsburgh and an hour away from the site of the shooting. Townhall has found footage of Crooks walking out during commencement to receive his diploma (1:08 timestamp on the right side of the split screen). Crooks, dressed in a black graduation gown designated for male graduates and donning a silver honors chord, crossed the stage and posed for a picture as few in the audience applauded him.
Crooks briefly appeared in the background of an old BlackRock advertisement filmed at BPHS. The company commercial spotlighted an economics teacher there. The firm confirmed Crooks’s ad appearance, according to a press statement the world’s largest money manager made on the matter. “We will make all video footage available to the appropriate authorities, and we have removed the video from circulation out of respect for the victims,” BlackRock said, stressing that the students were unpaid. However, as of Sunday night, two clips, a 15-second version and a longer 30-second cut, are still up under BlackRock’s X account.
