Thomas Crooks threatened to ‘shoot up’ his high school when he was just 15-years-old in an incident that wasn’t taken seriously at the time but is now being probed by the FBI, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Federal officers on Thursday visited Crooks’s former classmate Vincent Taormina, 20, to quiz him about the shooter’s ‘hatred’ of politicians and the threats he made as a freshman at Bethel Park High School.
Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com Taormina said, ‘We had like this anonymous place you could post things or tell on someone on our computers at school and he posted something like ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow,’ and something else that made it sound like he’d put bombs in the cafeteria bathrooms.
‘Half of us just didn’t come to school the next day – I didn’t. But it wasn’t taken seriously.
‘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.’
The threat came during Crooks’s freshman year at Bethel Park High and saw both it and the local middle school shut down
Crooks in his 2018 middle school yearbook photo. The following year he threatened to shoot up his high school
According to Taormina investigators were keen to hear more about the threats made by the younger Crooks in 2019 which were not, he said, taken seriously at the time.
There is no picture of Crooks in Bethel Park High School’s 2019 yearbook and in fact only one appears to have been taken during his career at the school – the now widely seen 2020 picture which became the first published of him following his June 13 assassination attempt.
Since then, only a thin portrait of Crooks, 20, has emerged from his beginnings as a ‘normal’ little boy to the young man who grew up to be an increasingly troubled loner whose internet search history included ‘major depressive disorder’ and who some suspected was bi-polar or schizophrenic.
Former classmates have described him as sweet, quiet, intelligent and a ‘loner’ who was a bit ‘off,’
They say he ate lunch alone and was bullied for being shy and ‘weird.’
Crooks opened fire on the former president as he addressed a rally of supporters in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday
Madison Rudolph, 17, who was in Crooks’s computer class despite their age difference told DailyMail.com that he was part of a small friend group she described as ‘outcasts’ with ‘strange hobbies’ the details of which she could not remember but she recalled that they wore nails as accessories.
Crooks’s high school experience coincided with the global pandemic and Rudolph noted that he was further ostracized for continuing to wear a mask long after the mandates had been lifted and student life resumed a semblance of normalcy.
One friend recalled that during the time of remote learning Crooks would not put on his camera when joining classes on Zoom.
Crooks was not a member of any high school clubs, teams or groups in stark contrast to his older sister Katie, 22, who was a popular and far more outgoing student, acting as both a school custodian and a member of the school yearbook team during her time at Bethel Park High.
Crooks graduated from high school in 2022 but was listed as absent from the senior yearbook pictures as he had been the year before.
He recently graduated from the Community College of Allegheny County with an associate degree in engineering science this spring and had been admitted to both the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Morris University for the fall.
At Trump’s campaign rally in Butler on Saturday, Crooks took aim at the former president hitting him in the ear, killing one member of the crowd and seriously injuring two others
Crooks in his elementary school yearbook as an eight year-old
He attended Abraham Lincoln Elementary School from 2009 to 2014, before moving to Neil Armstrong Middle School. Crooks is seen here while attending elementary school
The shooting on Saturday, which came so close to killing the former president, left father-of-two retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, 50, dead and two other attendees critically injured.
Former Marine David Dutch, 57, was shot in the chest and liver and has so far undergone two surgeries, while the family of the other victim James Copenhaver, 74, has asked for privacy while they come to terms with the ‘life-altering’ injuries he sustained.
So far, no motive has emerged for the shooting but, for Taormina, one possible reason was simply notoriety.
He said, ‘He was someone who flew under the radar, someone easily forgotten, people didn’t pay much attention to.
‘Maybe part of his motive was just to solidify his name in the history books because really he was a nobody.’
Investigators have revealed that they have managed to access the information stored on both of Crooks’s cell phones which they recovered, and which contained just 27 contacts.
The cells showed that Crooks visited the Butler site of the rally at least twice ahead of the event and contained photographs of Trump, Joe Biden, Fulton DA Fani Willis, Rudy Giuliani, House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other politicians and celebrities as well as an unnamed member of the British royal family.
On Monday FBI agents visited his 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.
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, the family home is seen here
One friend told DailyMail.com: ‘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.’
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.
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 Allegheny Arms & Gun Works, a five-minute drive from his family home, where he purchased 50 rounds of ammunition.
Excllusive DailyMail.com Images taken at the scene show a ladder, hidden by dense shrubbery, propped against the side of the AGR building, leading directly to the rooftop
Police stand over the body of Thomas Matthews Crooks on a rooftop near the Trump rally on Saturday
On Monday FBI agents swarmed the AGR building from which Crooks fired his shots. DailyMail.com witnessed several as they inspected the roof, at one point one dropped to his belly, lying prone as Crooks had done as he took aim and fired at Trump as he addressed the crowd.
They swept the grounds and rooted through shrubbery and trees, and they removed the ladder while questions continue to rage as to just how on earth a lone gunman managed to put it, and himself, there in the first place.
Crooks was a dietary aide at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center – where he provided food and care for post-hospital elderly and sick people.
The FBI has not responded to DailyMail.com’s repeated attempts to reach them by phone and text.
