[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] It has been revealed that the gunman who attempted to assassinate Trump at a Pennsylvania rally last week flew a drone over the site just hours before the shooting.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was able to navigate the drone over the western Pennsylvania fairgrounds and obtain aerial footage on July 13 - the same day as Trump's Butler rally.
Crooks allegedly flew the drone on a programmed flight path earlier in the day, and officials say that the predetermined path suggests Crooks had flown the small aircraft more than once in order to scope out the site of the rally.
The shocking revelation was made on Friday - almost a week after the ill-fated campaign event - by law-enforcement officials, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It was yet another example of how the Secret Service failed to do an adequate job of securing the area, leaving the MAGA crowd and the former president exposed to the subsequent dangerous situation.
It has been revealed that the gunman who attempted to assassinate Trump at a Pennsylvania rally last week flew drones over the site just hours before the shooting
It has been revealed that the gunman who attempted to assassinate Trump at a Pennsylvania rally last week flew drones over the site just hours before the shooting
Trump sustained a wound on his ear from a gunshot graze and one spectator was killed when at least six rounds of ammunition were fired by the assassin.
Crooks was killed following the shooting after a Secret Service sniper team returned fire.
Would-be Donald Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks looked up pornography not long before he shot at the former president. The search was the last one Crooks, 20, made on his phone before wounding Trump as he spoke at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last Saturday. Other queries included Princess Kate as well as her fellow British royals, both Trump and President Joe Biden, and school shooter Ethan Crumbley.
FBI investigators discovered the search history after finally cracking his encrypted Samsung Android phone days after the assassination attempt.
The senior law enforcement source who told the Daily Beast about the porn search said it was 'not unusual' among high-profile killers. Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooter Adam Lanza had child abuse images on his phone and Al Qaeda terrorists also watched extreme porn.
Agents couldn't initially break into Crooks' phone and sent it to the Operational Technology Division at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.
The only other recent activity on his phone was texts from his parents asking where he was after he didn't come home from the gun range when they expected.
Investigators have moved on to his laptop and external hard drives found during a search of his parents' home, where he lived.
As the FBI searched his two cell phones and one laptop, they found he had searched for dates of Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he ultimately made his assassination attempt. There were also searches for the dates of the Democratic National Convention, investigators told a private briefing with lawmakers. They also found photos of Biden and Trump in Crooks’ material.
FBI officials in the briefing said that that Crooks' search history indicated he had a strong interest in famous people, sources on the call confirmed to DailyMail.com.
Alongside the explosives in Crooks' car, investigators also recovered a bullet proof vest and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, which had been purchased, alongside a ladder, on the same day as the shooting.
Another bulletproof vest, and third remote-controlled bomb was later discovered at the house he shared with his parents.
The latest revelation that a transmitter was also with him has raised fears that Crooks may have been planning to continue his killing spree if he had escaped from the roof with his life, and may have had an accomplice to help him.
Hours earlier Crooks had asked his boss for the day off, telling him he had 'something to do', before travelling to Saturday's rally. The would-be assassin told colleagues at the Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center that he would see them on Sunday. Crooks worked there as a dietary aide providing food and care for post-hospital elderly and sick people.
'We are shocked and saddened to learn of his involvement as Thomas Matthew Crooks performed his job without concern and his background check was clean,' administrator Marcie Grimm said in a statement.
A colleague at the facility said Crooks never expressed political views at work and wasn't a 'radical'.
'It's hard seeing everything that's going on online because he was a really, really good person that did a really bad thing, and I just wish I knew why,' he added.
He graduated from the Community College of Allegheny County in May with an associate degree in engineering science, according to school officials who said they were 'shocked and saddened by the horrific turn of events'.
Crooks' father Matthew was seen on Tuesday morning for the first time since the shooting as he opened the door of the family home to FBI agents. Both of Crooks' parents are behavioral therapists and Crooks' father said he was baffled by his son's actions.
Grinning out from beneath a military helmet, dressed in combat gear and a bullet proof vest this never-before-seen photograph shows Thomas Matthew Crooks aged nine.
Today, through a trove of pictures and the accounts of family friends, Dailymail.com can give the first real glimpse into the childhood of the boy who would grow up to try to kill a president. He went from the 'normal little boy' who liked to play soldiers and miniature golf, to the increasingly disturbed young man who grew his hair long, isolated himself from friends and became plagued by mental health disturbances that led some to believe he was either bi-polar or schizophrenic.
There it is. Nuts, not Antifa. So a Lurid Crime on Page 3: Non-WoT, not Fifth Column on Page 1. It was a journey that ended catastrophically at Trump's campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday when Crooks, 20, took aim at the former president hitting him in the ear, killing one member of the crowd and seriously injuring two others.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one person who knows the family well said, 'He was a cute kid, maybe a little bit off, maybe a little bit of a loner.
'But in the past couple of years he started suffering what we all suspected was mental health issues.'
The friend, who has known the family throughout Crooks's childhood, continued, 'We never knew for sure if he had been diagnosed or if he was being medicated but he started growing his hair long, he withdrew.
'There was nothing super alarming but looking back of course you question what was missed? His father was a psychologist.
'I'm not blaming the parents but did he suppress something? Was there some denial there? Was there anything hidden?'
Crooks, known as Tom to his family, grew up in the Bethel Park suburb where his family still live with his parents and older sister, Katherine, 22.
He attended Abraham Lincoln Elementary School from 2009 to 2014, before moving on to Neil Armstrong Middle School 2015 to 2016, then Independence Middle School 2017 to 2018, and ultimately Bethel Park High School from which he graduated in 2022. Seen in pictures across the years it is impossible to look at the face of the little boy who poses in yearbook picture after yearbook picture in his polo shirt and glasses without straining to see some foreshadowing of the change that, friends say, overtook him in the end.
In one, under the banner of 'Follow your Dreams' he is dressed in combat gear, the innocent costume of so many little boys now cast in a more sinister light by the act he would ultimately commit. But as a child, he was, friends say, if not exactly outgoing then certainly apparently 'normal.'
One said, 'He was definitely very intelligent that's something that was always clear. He was in the math club; I think that was the only club he was part of other than the gun club later, and he won quite a big scholarship for math.'
In pictures taken in elementary school he moves from the middle to the edges of the frame. In early photographs he is surrounded by friends, on costume days or mini-golf outings. Later he is at the edge, peaking round a bandstand pillar or kneeling at the end of a line with a basketball and his peers.
Contrary to what one 'friend' has publicly claimed in recent days those who spoke with DailyMail.com insist he did not dress in hunting or camouflage gear but instead was always smartly turned out in a polo shirt and pants or shorts.
A source said, 'He was always smartly dressed. He came from a good family — his mother is a very nice woman, and his father is actually very accomplished. I believe at one point he was earning between $300,000 and $500,000 a year.'
Today the modest family home, a small brick bungalow in a quiet suburban neighborhood sits under the watchful eyes of law enforcement and the world media. It gives little indication of its owners having any significant wealth.
On Monday FBI agents visited the home, speaking with Crooks's parents Matthew, 53, and Mary, 53, — both Pennsylvanian locals and both licensed counsellors — for several minutes before fanning out and moving door to door across the neighborhood.
It was here that Crooks grew up, and joined Clairton Sportsmen's Club where he honed his rifle skills. Speaking Monday, one friend pointed out: 'That club is also very much a social club as well as a shooting range.' But the friend admitted that one thing Crooks was not, was terribly social especially in later years.
They said: 'I suspect the FBI have interrogated his parents very thoroughly to find out what if anything they knew about his state of mind.
'We're just struggling to understand what happened, it's so shocking. This is a community and for this to have happened within it...it's almost too much to process right now. It's going to take a long time.'
Certainly, they said, something shifted in Crooks in recent years. He appears with a smile in every school yearbook until 2020, his sophomore year and the start of the global pandemic. After that he is absent, failing to show up for his yearbook photograph and a ghost in every group shot. According to the friend, 'Honestly we knew him less and less the older he got.'
But it seems he was nothing if not calculated and methodical. On Friday he went to Clairton Sportsmen's Club shooting range and practiced firing.
That’s unfortunately common in paranoid schizophrenics bent on murder, as I understand it. The next morning, he went to a Home Depot and purchased a five-foot ladder — pictures obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com show the concealed spot where he propped this ladder against the AGR building wall allowing him access to the roof across which he scrambled to take up position.
From the Home Depot he went to a gun store, which sources have identified to DailyMail.com as Allegheny Arms & Gun Works, a five-minute drive from his family home, where he purchased 50 rounds of ammunition.
Donald Trump's would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks wrote an ominous warning on a gaming platform before he shot the former president.
DailyMail.com confirmed U.S. Senators were told the 20-year-old gunman posted on Steam: 'July 13 will be my premiere, watch as it unfolds.'
On July 13 he opened fire on the Republican nominee from a roof just 130 yards away from the rally stage in Butler, Pennsylvania. |
An 18-year-old girl, who allegedly wrote about identifying as a male and had a “shrine” to mass killers, was arrested and charged this week for allegedly planning a mass school shooting at Mooresville High School in Indiana.
...every time you hear the phrase 