Thomas Crooks threatened to shoot up his high school when he was just 15 in an incident that was not taken seriously at the time but is now being investigated by the FBI, DailyMail.com can reveal.
On Thursday, federal officers visited Crooks’ former classmate, Vincent Taormina, 20, to question him about the shooter’s “hatred” of politicians and threats he made when he was a freshman at Bethel Park High School.
Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com, Taormina said: ‘We had a sort of anonymous place where you could post things or snitch on someone on our computers at school and he posted something like ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow’ and something else that made it look like he had planted bombs in the cafeteria toilets.
‘Half of us just didn’t go to school the next day, I didn’t go. But we didn’t take it seriously.
‘We all texted each other and it quickly became known that it was Thomas and his group of friends who had threatened to shoot up (the school).’
The threat came during Crooks’ freshman year at Bethel Park High and led to the closure of that school and the local high school.
Crooks in his 2018 high school yearbook photo. The following year he threatened to shoot up his high school.
According to Taormina, investigators were interested in learning more about threats made by the Crooks youth in 2019, which, he said, were not taken seriously at the time.
There is no photograph of Crooks in the 2019 Bethel Park High School yearbook, and in fact, only one appears to have been taken during his career at the school: the now widely seen 2020 photograph, which became the first published of him following his attempted murder on June 13.
Since then, only a cursory portrait of the 20-year-old Crooks has emerged, from his beginnings as a “normal” kid 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 bipolar or schizophrenic.
His former classmates have described him as a sweet, quiet, intelligent boy and a “loner” who was a little “out of place.”
They say he ate lunch alone and was harassed for being shy and “weird.”
Gunmen 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’ computer class despite their age difference, told DailyMail.com that he was part of a small group of friends she described as “outcasts” with “weird hobbies” whose details she could not remember, but she did remember them wearing nails as accessories.
Crooks’ high school experience coincided with the global pandemic, and Rudolph noted that he was further ostracized for continuing to wear a mask long after mandates were lifted and student life returned to some semblance of normalcy.
A friend recalled that during their time studying remotely, Crooks wouldn’t turn 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 her older sister, Katie, 22, who was a popular and much more outgoing student, serving as the school’s janitor and a member of the school’s yearbook team during her time at Bethel Park High.
Crooks graduated from high school in 2022, but was listed as absent in senior yearbook photos as he had been the previous year.
He recently graduated from Allegheny County Community College with an associate of science degree in engineering this spring and has 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 aimed a gun at the former president and struck him in the ear, killing one member of the crowd and seriously injuring two others.
Crooks in his elementary school yearbook when he was eight years old
He attended Abraham Lincoln Elementary School from 2009 to 2014, before moving on to Neil Armstrong Middle School. Crooks is pictured while attending the elementary school.
Saturday’s shooting, which nearly killed the former president, left Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old father of two and a retired fire chief, dead and two other aides seriously 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 as they come to terms with the “life-altering” injuries he suffered.
No motive has yet been given for the shooting, but in the Taormina case, one possible reason was simply notoriety.
He said: ‘He was someone who went unnoticed, someone easily forgotten, someone who people didn’t pay much attention to.
‘Maybe part of his motive was simply to solidify his name in the history books because he really was a nobody.’
Investigators have revealed that they have managed to access information stored on Crooks’ two recovered mobile phones, which contained just 27 contacts.
The cells showed Crooks visited the Butler rally site at least twice before the event and contained photographs of Trump, Joe Biden, Fulton District Attorney 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 the home and spoke with Crooks’ parents, Matthew, 53, and Mary, 53, both Pennsylvania residents and licensed counselors, for several minutes before dispersing and going door-to-door in the neighborhood.
Crooks, known as Tom to his family, grew up in the suburb of Bethel Park, where his family still lives with his parents and older sister; the family home is seen here.
A friend told DailyMail.com: ‘I suspect the FBI has questioned his parents very thoroughly to find out if they knew anything about his mental state.
“We’re trying to understand what happened. It’s very shocking. This is a community and for this to happen within it… it’s almost too much to process right now. It’s going to take a long time.”
According to the friend, “the truth is that we knew him less and less as he grew up.”
But he seems to have been calculating and methodical. On Friday he went to the Clairton Sports Club shooting range and practiced shooting.
The next morning, he went to a Home Depot and bought a five-foot ladder; photographs obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com show the hidden spot where he propped this ladder against the wall of the AGR building, allowing him to access the roof which he climbed over to take up position.
From Home Depot he went to Allegheny Arms & Gun Works, a five-minute drive from his family’s home, where he bought 50 rounds of ammunition.
Exclusive DailyMail.com images taken at the scene show a staircase, hidden by dense bushes, leaning against the side of the AGR building, leading directly to the roof.
Police stand over the body of Thomas Matthews Crooks on a rooftop near Trump’s rally on Saturday
On Monday, FBI agents swarmed the AGR building from where Crooks fired. DailyMail.com witnessed several of them as they searched the roof; at one point, one fell face down, lying prone as Crooks had done while aiming and firing at Trump as he addressed the crowd.
They swept the ground, dug through bushes and trees and removed the ladder as questions continue to emerge about how a lone gunman managed to put it, and himself, there in the first place.
Crooks was a nutritional assistant at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where she provided food and care to elderly and post-hospitalized patients.
The FBI has not responded to repeated attempts by DailyMail.com to contact them by phone and text message.
