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Thomas Matthew Crooks, when he just 15 years old, threatened to ‘shoot up’ his high school, an incident that was not considered serious at the time but is now being investigated by the FBI, according to a report. Crooks tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Saturday and was eventually neutralized by Secret Service.
However, law enforcement has since struggled to find out what led Crooks to carry out the near-fatal attack on the former president. On Thursday, federal officers questioned Vincent Taormina, 20, a former classmate of Crooks, about the shooter’s “hatred” of politicians and the threats he made during his freshman year at Bethel Park High School.
Crooks Was Not an Easy Child
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In an interview with DailyMail.com, Taormina said, “We had like this anonymous place where you could post things or tell on someone on your computers at school, and he posted something like, ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow,’ along something else that made it sound like he’d put bombs in the cafeteria bathrooms.”
During the exclusive interview to the outlet, Taormina said, “Half of us just didn’t come to school the next day – I didn’t. But it wasn’t taken seriously.
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“We all texted one another and it came out pretty quickly that it was Thomas and his friend group who’d made the threats to shoot [the school] up.”
According to Taormina, investigators were eager to learn more about the threats made by Crooks in 2019, which were not taken seriously at the time.
Crooks does not appear in the 2019 Bethel Park High School yearbook, and only one photo of him appears to have been taken during his time at the school. This widely circulated 2020 picture was the first to be published after his assassination attempt on June 13.
Since then, a limited portrait of Crooks, now 20, has emerged—from his beginnings as a ‘normal’ child to a young man who became an increasingly troubled loner.
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His internet search history included terms like ‘major depressive disorder,’ and some suspected he might have been bipolar or schizophrenic.
Quiet and a Loner
Former classmates described him as sweet, quiet, intelligent, and a ‘loner’ who seemed a bit ‘off.’ They said that he often ate lunch alone and was bullied for being shy and ‘weird.’
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Madison Rudolph, 17, who was in Crooks’s computer class despite their age difference, told DailyMail.com that he belonged to a small friend group she called ‘outcasts’ with ‘strange hobbies,’ though she couldn’t recall specific details, except that they wore nails as accessories.
Crooks’s high school years overlapped with the global pandemic, and Rudolph noted that he was further isolated for continuing to wear a mask long after mandates were lifted and student life returned to normal.
One friend remembered that during remote learning, Crooks would not turn on his camera during Zoom classes. Unlike his older sister Katie, 22, who was popular and more outgoing, participating as a school custodian and yearbook team member, Crooks did not join any high school clubs, teams, or groups.
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Crooks graduated from high school in 2022 but was absent from senior yearbook photos, as he had been the previous year.
He recently completed an associate degree in engineering science from the Community College of Allegheny County this spring and had been accepted to both the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Morris University for the fall.
The shooting on Saturday, which nearly killed the former president, resulted in the death of retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, 50, a father of two, and left two other attendees critically injured.
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