Portrait of Trump’s shooter: Quiet, withdrawn, with little political footprint

The man who authorities say tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump was a quiet student who took advanced classes and a sometimes-bullied loner who wasn’t vocal about his political views, classmates said on Sunday, as a portrait began to emerge of the gunman who shocked an American public already becoming inured to escalating political violence.

Schoolmates said Crooks, at times dressed in camouflage or hunting attire, had few friends and interacted awkwardly at school. “If someone would say something to his face, he would just kind of stare at them," said Julianna Grooms, who graduated one year after Crooks. “People would say he was the student who would shoot up high school."

Others in his tidy, suburban neighborhood of brick ranch homes said they had no recollection of him at all. Students from area high schools, gathered at summer parties this weekend, were checking their social media feeds for any trace of him and found little.

Law-enforcement officials struggled to quickly identify him after Saturday’s shooting, finding no photo ID on his body. They said the AR-15 rifle he used belonged to his father, and they were trying to determine whether he took the weapon without the older man’s knowledge. Crooks had fired multiple times from a rooftop roughly 400 feet away from where Trump spoke, killing one spectator, critically injuring two others and leaving the former president bloodied and defiant.

Investigators found rudimentary explosive devices in Crooks’s car parked near the rally in Butler, Pa., and found bomb-making materials at his family’s home, one hour to the south, said Federal Bureau of Investigation officials, who were working to determine what they were made of and if they were viable.

Crooks acted alone, and investigators were still trying to determine his motive and ideology, said Kevin Rojek, FBI special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office. Part of the challenge, officials said, was that they hadn’t found any of kind of the writings or manifestos that often surface after such attacks. FBI agents were urgently working to get access to Crooks’s cellphone, which they had shipped to the bureau’s lab at Quantico, Va. But the limited insights they had been able to glean into his recent communications hadn’t revealed anything about his motive or suggested anyone else was involved.

Crooks hadn’t been on the FBI’s radar as a possible threat before the shooting, and investigators had found no indications of mental-health issues, Rojek said. Crooks’s family was cooperating with investigators.

“We continue to look at all his social-media accounts and look for any potential threatening language," he said, “but as of right now, we have not seen it."

The streets around the Crooks’s home in Bethel Park were blocked off on Sunday as camera crews descended on the middle-class Pittsburgh suburb and police continued to investigate how a 20-year-old was able to climb with a rifle to the top of a building with a clear line of sight to Trump.

“We’re still trying to work through the details as far as his affinity for weapons and how much, if any, times he went to the range," Rojek said.

He appeared to have little social-media presence or much record of political activism. Crooks appeared to have an account on Discord, a social-media outlet popularized by videogame enthusiasts, but hadn’t used it much. He hadn’t posted with the account in months, a spokeswoman for the platform said, adding that Discord had removed Crooks’s account based on its off-platform behavior policy.

On President Biden’s inauguration day, Crooks gave $15 to the Chicago-based Progressive Turnout Project, a Democratic-aligned political-action committee that rallies voters, according to Federal Election Commission records. Pennsylvania voting records show he was a registered Republican.

“He never outwardly spoke about his political views or how much he hated Trump or anything," said Sarah D’Angelo, another classmate of Crooks at Bethel Park High. She recalled him playing games on his laptop during homeroom before the school day began.

She and others described him as somewhat of a loner, saying he had “a few friends," but “didn’t have a whole friend group." Crooks would sometimes sit alone at lunch, said Kendall Spragg, who was a year behind him at Bethel Park High School. “He didn’t really fit in with everybody else," she said.

As a sophomore, Crooks was photographed in the yearbook wearing a T-shirt of an American flag with the faces of past presidents at Mount Rushmore. As a senior, he won a $500 National Math & Science Initiative Star Award, according to TribLIVE, a Western Pennsylvania news outlet. The Bethel Park School District confirmed Crooks was in the graduating class of 2022 and said it was cooperating with law enforcement.

On Sunday, a girls’ lacrosse team was playing on the field at Bethel Park High School, but the gates were closed to the public to prevent reporters from talking to spectators. A police car was parked by the football field parking lot entrance. The sign out front reads “Municipality of Champions," in all caps, with the high school’s blackhawk logo and a list of state sport championships the school had won over the years. Above the doors is a large banner noting the school is a national blue-ribbon school.

That tightknit community appeared to leave Crooks on the outside. “You either fit in in Bethel Park or you don’t," Spragg said.

Dustin Volz contributed to this article.

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