Investigators Find No Clear Radical History for Suspect in Trump Assassination Attempt

On the evening of July 13, 2024, a 20-year-old community college graduate named Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight rounds from an AR-15-style rifle at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. One bullet grazed Trump's ear. Another killed 50-year-old Corey Comperatore. Two other attendees were critically wounded. Seconds later, a Secret Service counter-sniper killed Crooks on the rooftop from which he had fired [1].

Sixteen months later, in November 2025, the FBI closed its investigation — one of the most extensive ever conducted into an attack on a U.S. political figure. Over 480 FBI employees had worked the case. They conducted more than 1,000 interviews, processed over 2,000 tips, cracked 13 digital devices, and reviewed nearly 500,000 files [2]. Their conclusion: Crooks acted alone, and his motive remains unknown [3].

That admission — that the full investigative power of the federal government could not answer the question why — is what makes this case both ordinary and deeply unsettling.

A Quiet Life, Then a Plan

Thomas Matthew Crooks grew up in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, a middle-class suburb south of Pittsburgh. Friends described him as a "nice boy" who "kept to himself." His disciplinary record at school amounted to a single lunch detention for chewing gum in middle school. He joined the National Technical Honor Society as a junior and graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022 [4].

Both of Crooks' parents worked as licensed professional counselors. He enrolled at the Community College of Allegheny County and graduated two months before the shooting. He worked part-time as a dietary aide at a nursing home [4].

But in the final year of his life, something shifted. Crooks' father later told investigators he had noticed troubling changes: his son dancing alone in his bedroom throughout the night, talking to himself with animated hand movements — behaviors that had "become more prevalent after he had finished his last semester" [5]. In April 2024, Crooks searched online for "major depressive disorder," though whether he received a formal diagnosis remains unclear. A senior congressional source later said Crooks had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, and the family had a history of mental health and addiction issues [6].

No federal agency investigated Crooks before the attack. He had no criminal record. No tips about him were ever submitted to the FBI [1]. He did not appear on any watchlist.

The Planning Window

The behavioral trail that investigators did reconstruct reveals weeks of deliberate preparation — not impulsive action.

In the month before July 13, Crooks searched online for information about presidential candidates more than 60 times, including queries on July 5 for "DNC convention" and "when is the RNC in 2024" [5]. He researched the 2021 Oxford High School shooting and its perpetrator, Ethan Crumbley, as well as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy [7][8].

On July 6, the day after Trump's rally was announced, Crooks registered to attend. On July 7, he visited the Butler Farm Show grounds and spent 20 minutes surveying the site [5].

On July 12, the day before the rally, Crooks practiced at a shooting range where he held a membership. He purchased 50 rounds of ammunition and a five-foot ladder [5]. That same visit to the rally grounds, he flew a drone over the area for nearly 12 minutes, beginning at 3:51 p.m., capturing aerial views of the stage where Trump would speak [9].

On the morning of July 13, Crooks returned to the farm for over an hour. He told his employer he needed the day off because he had "something important to do," assuring coworkers he would be back the next day [5]. He asked his father to borrow his AR-15-style rifle, saying he planned to go to a shooting range — something he had done before, so the request raised no alarm [9].

Hours before the shooting, Crooks' parents called police to report him missing and expressed concern about his wellbeing [5].

When investigators searched his car and home, they found bomb-making materials. Two improvised explosive devices were recovered from his car trunk, and a remote detonator was found on his body [2]. The rifle had been partially disassembled for transport [2].

The Security Collapse

The operational planning was methodical. The security response was not.

Multiple congressional investigations have since documented a cascade of failures by the U.S. Secret Service. The most damning finding: senior Secret Service officials received classified intelligence about a threat to Trump's life ten days before the Butler rally but failed to relay it to the federal and local personnel responsible for securing the event [10][11].

On the day of the rally, communication broke down across agencies. Instead of a single unified command post, there were two. Officers used a "chaotic mixture" of radio, cell phone, text, and email [11]. Local officers spotted Crooks with a rangefinder — a device marksmen use to measure distance to a target — at least 25 minutes before the shooting. A Secret Service agent in a security room was informed of the suspicious person but the information never reached Trump's protective detail in time [11].

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul, concluded that the Secret Service's "lack of structured communication was likely the greatest contributor to the failures" [11]. The agency had also denied multiple requests for additional staff, assets, and resources for the Butler rally [11].

Source: Wikipedia / Britannica compilation

Data as of Dec 1, 2024CSV

Six Secret Service personnel were eventually suspended without pay for periods ranging from 10 to 42 days. No one was fired [12].

Reforms and Their Limits

In the year following Butler, the Secret Service announced a series of reforms. The agency created a new Aviation and Airspace Security division, overhauled radio communications and interoperability with state and local law enforcement, and expanded the use of drones for surveillance and counter-drone technology [13].

Of 46 recommendations made by congressional oversight bodies, the Secret Service had implemented 21 as of July 2025, with 16 in progress and nine directed at non-Secret Service stakeholders [13]. The Government Accountability Office offered eight additional recommendations, noting that "the Secret Service had no process to share classified threat information with partners when the information was not considered an imminent threat to life" [10].

Whether these reforms are sufficient remains contested. A DHS independent review warned that "without reform, another Butler can and will happen again" [14]. Former Secret Service agents interviewed by Fox News expressed concern that the structural problems — understaffing, interagency communication gaps, resource allocation driven by political considerations — have not been fundamentally resolved [15].

No Radical Footprint: Outlier or Norm?

The framing of Crooks as an anomaly — an assassin with no ideological trail — is itself worth examining. A review of major U.S. political assassination attempts and plots over the past 15 years suggests that unclear or mixed motives are more common than clean ideological narratives.

The 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was carried out by Jared Lee Loughner, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and held no coherent political ideology [16]. The 2017 congressional baseball shooting was committed by James Hodgkinson, who did have a clear left-wing political motive — but he remains an exception [16]. The 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi was carried out by David DePape, who had absorbed a constellation of conspiracy theories that spanned the political spectrum [16]. In 2023, Sai Varshith Kandula, who attempted to ram a truck into the White House, identified as a neo-Nazi — a clear ideological marker — but his operational planning was rudimentary [16].

Crooks himself left behind some ideological traces, though they resist easy categorization. The FBI identified a social media account believed to be his, containing over 700 posts from 2019-2020 — when he was 15 or 16 years old — that "appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes" and "espouse political violence," including quotes from Mao Zedong such as "the only true political power comes from the barrel of a gun" [17][18]. Yet Crooks was a registered Republican who also made a $15 donation to a progressive voter turnout group in 2021 [4]. The FBI emphasized these social media findings were preliminary and the account's authenticity was still being verified [18].

The Grievance Problem

Researchers who study lone-actor violence have increasingly argued that the binary framework of "radicalized" versus "not radicalized" misses the reality of how most attackers arrive at violence.

The concept of Lone Actor Grievance Fueled Violence (LAGFV), developed by researchers at institutions including Frontiers in Psychology and the Australian Institute of Criminology, holds that the common thread across school shooters, workplace attackers, and political assassins is not ideology but fixation on a grievance — personal, political, or some combination [19]. The reliance on legacy categories of left-wing or right-wing extremism, these researchers argue, "diminishes the complexity of factors contributing to these forms of offending" and "misses a critical opportunity to understand the pathways to violence" [19].

Source: Corner & Gill (2015), PMC / Frontiers in Psychology meta-analyses

Data as of Jun 1, 2024CSV

Meta-analyses of lone-actor attackers find that approximately 40% had a diagnosable mental health disorder, but only about 32% had a clear ideological motive. Personal grievance was the primary driver in roughly 28% of cases, while 22% showed a mix of grievance and ideology. Notably, 64% exhibited "leakage" — prior signaling of intent to someone in their environment — before attacking [20].

Crooks fits several of these patterns. He showed signs of mental health deterioration. He researched previous mass attackers. His parents reported him missing before the shooting. His online history contained extremist content but no coherent worldview. He prepared meticulously but told no one his plan.

The Legal Question

Because Crooks was killed during the attack, no prosecution followed. But the case raises questions about how the law handles political violence when motive is ambiguous.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 1751, assassination or attempted assassination of the president or a major presidential candidate carries penalties up to life imprisonment. The statute does not require prosecutors to prove a specific motive — only intent to kill [21]. Similarly, 18 U.S.C. § 351, which covers assassination of members of Congress and other officials, specifies that "the Government need not prove that the defendant knew that the victim of the offense was an individual protected by this section" [22].

In practice, however, motive matters enormously at sentencing and in how cases are characterized. The 2017 congressional baseball shooter's case was treated as domestic terrorism by investigators. The Pelosi attack was prosecuted under both federal and state charges, with DePape's conspiracy-laden statements used to establish intent [16]. In Crooks' case, the absence of a clear motive means the investigative narrative remains incomplete — an outcome that has fueled conspiracy theories and public distrust.

What the Surveillance Threshold Misses

A central paradox of the Crooks case is that existing legal thresholds for surveillance, watchlisting, or firearms restrictions would not have flagged him. He had no criminal record. He was not the subject of any FBI investigation. His social media posts from years earlier, even if they had been identified in real time, did not meet the legal standard for opening a case — the FBI requires "articulable factual basis" for a preliminary investigation [1].

The firearms question is equally stark: Crooks used his father's legally purchased rifle. Under federal law, there was no mechanism to prevent his access to it. Pennsylvania does not require a permit to purchase or possess a rifle, and there is no state-level red flag law that would have allowed family members or law enforcement to petition for temporary removal of firearms based on behavioral warning signs [4].

This gap — between observable behavioral change and the legal authority to intervene — is one that no post-Butler reform has addressed. The Secret Service reforms focus on event security and interagency communication. They do not address the upstream question of how to identify a person who is not yet on anyone's radar.

An Unresolved Case

The FBI's closing of the Crooks investigation without identifying a motive is not unprecedented, but it is rare for an attack of this magnitude. FBI Director Kash Patel stated in November 2025 that "no cover-up" was involved and that the investigation had been exhaustive [3]. Critics, including some members of Congress, have questioned whether the bureau's analytical frameworks are equipped to identify motives that do not conform to established categories of domestic extremism [11].

The Crooks case may ultimately say less about one 20-year-old's reasons and more about the structural assumptions embedded in American threat detection. The system is built to find people with manifestos, organizational ties, and digital paper trails. Thomas Matthew Crooks had none of these. He had a borrowed rifle, a drone, a ladder, homemade explosives, and a plan that almost worked.

The question the case leaves behind is not just what drove him — it is whether the framework designed to catch the next attacker is looking in the right places.