Investigation into Trump shooting started within minutes on the roof, but questions linger

Local officers in camouflage stand atop the metal roof next to the body of Thomas Matthew Crooks , the 20-year-old’s shorts, Sketchers sneakers and black socks clearly visible. A trail of blood leads dozens of feet down the white roof’s slope.

A black AR-style rifle lies nearby.

One officer’s voice on the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit body camera footage counts scattered bullet casings. “Looks like at least eight,” he says. In another moment, a Secret Service officer in a dark suit asks about suspects and injuries.

“I’m just trying to get clear information to relay back to D.C.,” he says, waving his cell phone.

The scenes were captured in the chaotic minutes after a shooter took aim at former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Pennsylvania. They also marked the start of what has become a sprawling FBI-led investigation to find out how, and why, Crooks opened fire, shooting Trump’s ear and leaving another rally-goer dead.

Two weeks since the shooting shook the nation, FBI director Christopher Wray’s testimony last week in a congressional hearing, along with other testimony and media reports, have helped sharpen the picture of the shooter’s meticulous planning in the week leading up to the assassination attempt.

That included revelations that Crooks searched online for “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” visited the rally grounds, practiced at a gun range and used a rifle with a collapsible stock that might have been easier to conceal. He flew a drone in the area the day of the July 13 rally and had two crude explosive devices in his car parked near the site, designed for remote detonation.

Details have fueled the ire against the Secret Service for failing to prevent the shooting, but so far they fail to explain why an isolated young Bethel Park man – who lived with his parents, worked at a nursing home and was planning to continue his studies after earning an associate’s degree – became a would-be assassin.

While many initially linked the attack to America’s heated political divides, more than 220 interviews, including with Crooks’ parents, and an examination of his home and some of his electronic devices and accounts have yet to uncover evidence of a clear motive, political or otherwise . Nothing in Crooks’ life that might have precipitated violence has emerged.

“We’d love to have a road map that tells us exactly what he was thinking,” Wray said at the hearing Wednesday. “We haven’t found that yet.”

After mass shootings, Americans have become accustomed to the painful wait for the answer to “why.” But the lack of obvious motive thus far for such a targeted attack on a former president and candidate has made that void particularly confounding.

Was Crooks suffering from mental illness? Suicidal? Was he seeking infamy? Did he believe such an act would help him regain control of his life?

While answers may still surface, experts say there may never be any fully satisfying explanation, especially if the evidence doesn’t fit into pre-existing notions about what lies behind an assassination attempt.

“The challenge for all of us who aren’t committing this kind of violence is it doesn’t make any sense to us,” said Katherine Schweit, a former FBI special agent who authored a study to aid responses to active shooter incidents.

A week of preparation and planning

On the morning of July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks’ plans seemed to be in place.

He had been preparing since July 6, when he is believed to have registered for the Trump rally, conducted a Google search for how far away assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was from JFK in 1963 and visited the rally site in Butler, roughly 54 miles to the north of his home.

His efforts seemed to go unnoticed not just by law enforcement but by his parents, both licensed counselors, with whom he lived in Bethel Park, a middle-class neighborhood of one- and two-story brick homes dotted with 1950s metal awnings set among hilly streets with green lawns.

Nearby was Bethel Park High School, where as a student he often wore hunting clothes and was quiet – and where in the wake of the shooting former classmates disagreed over whether he was bullied. In May, he finished his associate’s degree after studying engineering science at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh.

At some point, packages marked “hazardous materials” had been delivered to the house, according to the Wall Street Journal , which noted law enforcement officials said they might have been used in making the two explosives found in his vehicle and one in his home.

At the nursing home less than a mile from his house, where Crooks worked as a dietician’s assistant, he had asked to take Saturday off, ABC reported .

On Friday, one day before the rally, Crooks – who’d joined a sportsmen’s club with rifle and pistol ranges – went to shoot at a range, Wray told Congress without specifying where. He was a firearm enthusiast, and the family had 14 guns in the house. Last year, he purchased his AR-style rifle from his father – one his father had owned for a decade – in a private transaction that did not require a background check or paperwork.

His parents haven’t spoken publicly about whether they noticed their son showing signs of distress or talking about politics in the lead-up to the shooting. His father is a Libertarian and his mother a Democrat. Crooks donated $15 to ActBlue, a political action committee supporting Democrats, in January 2021, the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. But that fall, he registered to vote in Allegheny County as a Republican.

When the day of the rally arrived, Wray said Crooks told his father that he was going to shoot at the range. “He didn’t go to the range and he didn’t come back,” Wray said.

Instead, Crooks ran some errands that morning, apparently buying a ladder from a Home Depot according to a bloody receipt found on him after snipers shot and killed him.

He also purchased 50 rounds of ammunition, authorities said. Among the gun stores contacted by police following the shooting was the Allegheny Arms & Gun Works, open Saturday mornings in a strip mall near a nail salon and a Mexican restaurant. Josh Rowe, the store’s co-owner, previously told USA TODAY that he was cooperating with law enforcement.

It takes about an hour to reach the rust-belt working-class city of Butler from Crooks’ home, and authorities say he was in Butler that morning.

Officials have not said which route he took, whether he crossed the Ohio River in downtown Pittsburgh or perhaps took the bridge over Neville Island, which is home to the Robert Morris University Island Sports Center, part of the college he had planned to attend in the fall.

The drive to Butler requires exiting onto winding, two-lane country roads before the Farm Show comes into view. On that day, American flags were hung from the lifts of two trucks in preparation for the Trump rally that evening.

Wearing a T-shirt that bore the logo of Demolition Ranch , a popular YouTube channel hosted by a gun influencer, Crooks stayed at the site for 70 minutes that morning, Wray said, then left before returning in the afternoon. He parked a car containing explosive devices, a Hyundai Sonata, according to the Wall Street Journal, somewhere near the venue.

His drone flew at about 3:50 p.m. for about 11 minutes, apparently live streaming over an area about 200 yards from the stage where Trump would speak , the FBI said. The drone didn’t record video, Wray said.

At some point that Saturday, Crooks’ parents called the police to say they were concerned because he had gone missing, Wray said, although he wasn’t certain if that was before or after the shooting.

Wray also said this week the FBI is still trying to determine if the shooter carried the rifle with him that day or had hidden it somewhere ahead of time.

Some law enforcement officials spotted Crooks with a backpack and identified him as suspicious, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials have said. One officer reportedly took two photos of him and texted them around.

Crooks still managed to approach the American Glass Research building, which abuts the rally grounds.

The search for a motive

One day after Crooks nearly took Trump’s life – and killed 50-year-old firefighter and father Corey Comperatore , while wounding two others – FBI officials told reporters they had yet to uncover a motive .

About two weeks later, despite assigning hundreds of agents, gaining access to the shooter’s phone and interviewing hundreds of people , why he showed up at the Farm Show rally with a rifle still remains a mystery – unusual in the age of social media and the Internet.

“A lot of the usual kind of low-hanging-fruit places that we would find that have not yielded significant clues,” Wray testified Wednesday.

“Having said that, we have seen indications that he was interested in public figures,” Wray added.

Crooks’ search history included seeking information about President Joe Biden, the Democratic National Convention, Attorney General Merrick Garland, a British royal and Wray himself, according to New York Times reporting that cited two unnamed officials.

Schweit, a former FBI special agent, told USA TODAY that after two weeks of work the lack of definitive evidence of a politically partisan motive for trying to assassinate Trump may be telling.

“It makes me think they might never find anything hard and fast – I mean, these investigators know what they’re doing,” Schweit said.

Along with looking up Oswald’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy, officials told lawmakers on July 17 that Crooks researched high school mass shooter Ethan Crumbley, who is serving a life sentence after killing four of his Oxford, Michigan classmates when he was 15 years old, according to CNN and the Washington Post .

“That has been a common trend among many juvenile mass shooters – they will do research, they will copy and want to emulate other attackers,” John Horgan, a Georgia State University psychology professor who researches violent extremism, told USA TODAY.

Schweit said sometimes a person decides to commit targeted violence before they have a target in mind. Take the 2016 Pulse shooter, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 and wounded 53 at an Orlando gay nightclub in 2016, she said. It was later learned that Mateen, who pledged allegiance to ISIS’s leader, didn’t have Pulse as the planned target before that night, and may not have even known it was a gay nightclub.

“He decided to go ahead and commit targeted violence, and then he had to find the right targeted violence to commit,” Schweit said.

Crooks had also researched major depressive disorder, officials reportedly told lawmakers on July 17. That has raised questions about whether Crooks dealt with mental health issues.

A desire for suicide can be a factor when it comes to explaining violent acts that can result in the death of the perpetrator, according to Colin Clarke, a terrorism and security researcher at The Soufan Group consultancy.

“My own take on why he did it was, I think this was somebody that was deeply depressed, struggling with mental illness, decided that they were going to end their life, and wanted to do it in a really high profile way,” Clarke told USA TODAY.

Wray also said Wednesday that many people described Crooks in interviews as a loner. The ongoing analysis of his devices, geolocation data and accounts fit that description, he said.

“His list of contacts for example is very short compared to what you would normally see from most people,” Wray said. But because Crooks used encrypted applications, the FBI is still trying to access that content as part of its ongoing investigation, Wray said.

It’s more common, however, for such perpetrators to reveal key plot points and intentions to friends, family members or co-workers, Horgan said.

“I think anyone who plans an event like this knows that we are going to pick apart their motivation,” Horgan said. “So either they take steps to conceal and confound us, or, quite frankly, they just don't care.”

Investigation continues into how, and why

As Trump took the stage just after 6 p.m., Crooks was moving into position.

The roof of the industrial building 150 yards from Trump’s podium, which houses a company that manufactures equipment for the bottle industry, didn’t have a guard on the roof even though police were reportedly stationed inside .

The FBI said investigators believe Crooks climbed the roof by scaling mechanical equipment on the ground and piping on the side of the building. It was hot that day – in the 80s – and hotter up on the roof.

“Someone’s on top of the roof,” a man said in a video posted on social media , after Trump had started speaking. Crooks began shooting nearly a minute and a half later, a Washington Post analysis found .

Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Christopher Paris testified that Crooks was on the roof for roughly three minutes before he fired, CNN reported .

At 6:12 p.m., Trump was swarmed by Secret Service agents and led wounded from the stage.

It didn’t take long after the shooting for outrage among lawmakers to build over what critics said were security lapses in protecting the former president. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle , excoriated by a congressional committee, resigned over what she acknowledged was a significant failure.

While last week’s congressional grilling is now past, the FBI investigation into how and why it happened is still ongoing. That includes continuing to dig into the shooter’s electronic devices and accounts, some of which remain to be examined.

There’s likely more to learn about the source of the explosives. Wray said the two devices in the car had receivers that could allow them to be detonated remotely, and the object with an antenna found on the roof with Crooks was a transmitter. However, the FBI so far believes detonation from the roof wouldn’t have worked because the receivers were switched off.

In addition, although the FBI believes Crooks only managed to fire eight shots, the fact that he had dozens of rounds of ammunition with him during the attack raises questions about the scope of his intentions.

It’s typical for a perpetrator to come to the scene of a targeted shooting with more ammunition than they could possibly shoot, which can help them feel more in control, according to Schweit. The ammunition and explosive devices could also indicate an interest in killing more people than just Trump, even if Trump was the primary target.

It’s possible time will help fill in the blanks when it comes to motive.

For years, the public had little information on why 64-year-old shooter Stephen Paddock killed 58 people at a Las Vegas concert in 2017. But a trove of FBI-released documents in 2023 indicated he may have been driven by anger at how casinos were treating him.

“We’re going to leave no stone unturned,” Wray said. “The shooter may be deceased, but the FBI’s investigation is very much ongoing.”

On Thursday, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa released the body cam footage from the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit, obtained via congressional request.

In a statement, Grassley said he was concerned by the “fragmented and delayed chain of communication between local law enforcement” and the “seemingly delayed response in identifying and disabling a potential detonator device” related to the shooter’s explosives.

The three videos together run 28 minutes, starting at around 6:27 p.m., minutes after the former president was shot. By then, Crooks lay prone on the roof above, face down – shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.

“I’m trying to figure out how this guy got here,” a Beaver County officer asks in one clip as he approaches the single-story building outside the security perimeter.

He was not the only one who was confused. In the aftermath, a friend from a community college mathematics book club texted Crooks’s phone on learning that he had been identified as the shooter, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“Isn’t that crazy,” the friend wrote, “they think it’s you.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Investigation into Trump shooting started within minutes on the roof, but questions linger