The man who authorities said attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania was a member of a local gun club and worked as a dietary aide at a nursing facility.
The shooter, identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was killed by at least one Secret Service sharpshooter, authorities said.
Corey Comperatore, 50, a former chief of the Buffalo Township Volunteer Fire Company, was identified as the sole victim fatally shot by Crooks during Saturday’s attempt in Butler. Two other people were injured and are stable.
The shooter used a semiautomatic rifle, three senior U.S. law enforcement officials said based on what was found at the scene. Investigators are looking into whether the gun belonged to his father and had been purchased legally, according to two senior law enforcement officials.
He is believed to have fired eight shots before he was taken down, said an official, citing preliminary findings.
Multiple suspicious canisters or containers were found in the shooter’s vehicle, but it’s unclear whether they were functional as incendiary or explosive devices, two officials said.
Crooks’ family is cooperating with investigators. His motive remains unclear, said a senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the matter.
The Defense Department confirmed that Crooks had no affiliation with the U.S. military.
He was a member of the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club in Pittsburgh. The facility has various shooting ranges, including a 200-yard rifle range, as well as pistol ranges and indoor and outdoor archery ranges.
“We’re sick over this,” club president Bill Sellitto said. “It’s just a terrible thing.”
In a statement, the club said it “fully admonishes the senseless act of violence that occurred” Saturday and offered “its sincerest condolences to the Comperatore family and extends prayers to all of those injured including the former President.”
The Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where the shooter worked as a dietary aide, said in a statement that “his background check was clean” and that he “performed his job without any concern.”
“We are shocked and saddened to learn of his involvement,” Marcie Grimm, and administrator at the center, said in a statement Sunday. She said that the center is cooperating with law enforcement and that it couldn’t comment further.
Bethel Park is a predominantly white, relatively well-to-do city in the southern reaches of greater Pittsburgh. The site of the rally, Butler, is about an hour’s drive north of Pittsburgh.
Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022. He was among more than a dozen students who received National Math & Science Initiative Star Awards that year, according to a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
A high school classmate, Jason Kohler, 21, said Crooks was a “loner” who was “bullied so much in high school.”
He would regularly wear hunting outfits and was made fun of for the way he dressed, Kohler said.
“He would sit alone at lunch. He was just the outcast,” Kohler said. “It’s honestly kind of sad.”
Michael Dudjak, 20, who went to school with Crooks for most of his life, recalled him as a relatively reserved and quiet classmate. He didn’t hear or see Crooks being actively bullied by their peers, Dudjak said, but Crooks was “on his own a lot.”
He couldn’t recall Crooks ever being outspoken about politics or very active on social media. Dudjak was with some friends and acquaintances from high school Saturday night when he learned that Crooks was the shooter.
They were all “in shock” and “couldn’t fathom” the news, Dudjak said.
“It’s definitely terrifying for someone you went to school with to commit such a heinous act. … That’s the craziest thing about it when it entered my brain,” Dudjak said. “You were in the same class as this person two years ago.”
A man who lives on the shooter’s street said he was shocked to wake up to the news that a neighbor was responsible for the assassination attempt. “It’s absolutely nuts,” said the man, Andrew Blanco, 39.
Blanco said that most people on the block are friendly but that he rarely saw or spoke to anyone at the home.
“I just don’t know anything about them, because they’re not even outside,” Blanco said.
Dan Grzybek, a Democrat on the Allegheny County Council who lives down the street from the shooter’s home in Bethel Park, said neighbors can’t believe the shooter lived among them.
“No one ever expects that something like this would be done by someone who lives right in their neighborhood,” Grzybek said.
Grzybek said that when he was running for his County Council seat last fall, he met Crooks’ parents while he was knocking on doors in the neighborhood. Speaking at the family’s front door, Grzybek said he had a “very pleasant conversation” with Crooks’ parents.
Grzybek said he hadn’t previously met the shooter. It was a “very typical voter conversation,” Grzybek said.
Pennsylvania voter records listed a Thomas Matthew Crooks with the same address and birth date as a registered Republican. But Crooks appeared to have made a $15 donation to a liberal political action committee on Inauguration Day 2021, according to Federal Election Commission records.
