Thomas Matthew Crooks alleged Donald Trump sniper shooting had once threatened to shoot up his school in Pennsylvania along with put bombs in the bathrooms. Threats that the school at the time didn’t take seriously as the FBI now launches probe.
A former classmate of alleged Donald Trump shooter, Thomas Crooks, 20, threatened to ‘shoot up’ his high school when he was 15 years old along with ‘put bombs’ in the bathrooms’. The claims made earlier this week has since led to the FBI now probing the school.
Federal officers on Thursday visited Crooks’s former classmate, Vincent Taormina, 20, to quiz him about the shooter’s alleged ‘hatred’ of politicians and the threats he made as a freshman at Bethel Park High School in Pennsylvania.
JUST IN: Former Thomas Crooks classmate says Crooks was a known Trump hater and was a “know it all.”
The FBI still doesn’t know what Crooks’ motive could have been.
Hispanic classmate Vincent Taormina recalled a political disagreement he had with Crooks after he told him that… pic.twitter.com/LzgnohInnw
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 17, 2024
Crooks was name that kept coming up at school
The probing comes days after Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to take advantage of grossly incompetent security (or as many are increasingly coming to believe; an insider job) and get a number of shots off during a Saturday rally in Butler, PA, where Trump had come to address his supporters, with the alleged gunman firing a bullet that went through the top of Trump’s right ear, killing an attendee and critically injuring two others with Secret Service snipers taking out and killing the would be assassin within a minute of Crooks firing 8 gunshots.
During a Fox News interview, Taormina told the outlet that the crowd Crooks ran in was suspected of being behind word of a school shooting plan.
‘A name that kept coming up was ‘Thomas,” he said.
Taormina did not offer details and his story was unconfirmed, but he said the incident occurred his freshman year.
Since Crooks was 20 years old, that would put it in the 2016-2017 range.
‘Everyone’s going through Snapchat, everyone’s texting everybody, everyone saying this, that and the third. Everybody was saying it was Thomas who made a threat and it was that friend group,’ Taormina told Fox News.
‘Everyone was mainly blaming the friend group, but a name that kept coming up was ‘Thomas.’
Taormina said nothing resulted from the threat, but Crooks was out of school for a time.
Sought to target political figure cause he hated all politicians
‘It wasn’t anything like a suspension or anything,’ he told the outlet. ‘It was just a couple of days.’
Taormina also recalled Crooks as being passionately unhappy with the country’s leading politicians — in 2016, those included Trump as well as Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Taormina who is Hispanic said he responded that Trump was a great president, with Crooks mocking him in return, ‘insinuating that I was stupid,’ along with saying, ‘Well you’re Hispanic, so shouldn’t you hate Trump?’
‘He was a know-it-all,’ he added. ‘He acted like he knew everything, especially politics-related.’
‘He was real smug, arrogant whenever he was talking…It got under my skin a lot,’ Taormina added.
The comments coincide with the FBI telling during a congressional briefing on Wednesday of finding a number of searches on one of the two phones Crooks kept, including searches of Trump and President Joe Biden and other prominent politicians, suggesting that the 20 year old didn’t necessarily have a political ideology but more likely the desire to take out a prominent individual and perhaps leaving a lasting, infamous legacy as beholden to mass shooters.
But there was more to come.
Crooks repeat behavior?
Speaking to the dailymail on Thursday, 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.’
According to Taormina, the threats were never taken seriously by the school.
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.
Seemingly the 20 year old had everything to live for.
On Friday, Crooks went to Clairton Sportsmen’s Club shooting range and practiced firing, where he along with his father were members of.
Instead of turning up to work on Saturday at a local nursing home where Crooks assisted, the 20 year old instead went to a Home Depot and purchased a five-foot ladder –where later that day he propped the 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. Before eventually driving part of the way to the rally meeting and then scoping the area.
When he had called his nursing home employer that morning, Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center where he worked as a dietary aide, Crooks said he wouldn’t be able to make it in that day, but assured his employer that he would be back to work on Sunday. He never made it.
