Trump Shooter Autopsy Report Released

Thomas Matthew Crooks, suspected gunman in attempted Trump assassination, who graduated from Bethel Park High School with the Class of 2022, in Bethel Park, Pa. Bethel Park School District via AP

Authorities in Butler County, Pennsylvania, released a report Thursday providing more details on the death of the 20-year-old man who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump.

Butler County Coroner William Young found that Thomas Matthew Crooks died from a single gunshot wound to the head at 6:25 p.m. local time on July 13, and his official cause of death was a homicide, according to a report released by his office.

The Secret Service confirmed that a sniper team shot Crooks after he opened fire on the rally last month. He was perched from the roof of a building about 400 feet from the rally site, officials said.

Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe this week testified at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee joint hearing that the agency’s snipers “neutralized” Crooks within several seconds after he fired upon the rally. The sniper, he said, had full discretion to use deadly force without having to seek any clearance to fire.

Rowe also said that he had traveled to the Butler rally site to better understand the security failure that almost resulted in the death of Trump, the Republican nominee for president.

“What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe testified at the Senate hearing. “I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.”

Motive Still Unclear

So far, local and federal agencies have had little to say about Crooks’s motive behind the shooting, which, besides resulting in a gunshot wound to Trump’s ear, left one rally attendee dead and two others injured.

In late July, Congress brought in representatives for both the FBI and the Secret Service, with FBI Director Christopher Wray telling a House panel that his bureau had no information about why Crooks carried out the assassination attempt or whether he was motivated by a particular political animus.

But FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said in a joint Senate hearing earlier this week that officials found at least one social media account on an undisclosed platform that was suspected to be connected to Crooks. The account was active between 2019 and 2020, and it posted more than 700 comments in that time frame, he said.

“Some of these comments ... appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence,” Abbate said.

The deputy director said that he did not provide the name of the social media platform because FBI agents are not 100 percent positive it belongs to Crooks.

“While the investigative team is still working to verify this account to determine if it did in fact belong to the shooter, we believe it important to share and note it today, particularly given the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter’s potential motive and mindset,” Abbate said during the hearing, referring to the account.

Andrew Torba, the head of Gab, a social media website, wrote on X that the FBI had sent an emergency disclosure request to his company for an account that was believed to have belonged to Crooks. He said that the account in question, which has not been conclusively connected to Crooks, “was a pro-lockdown, pro-immigration, left-wing Joe Biden supporter.”

“We understand that the Gab account is pro-immigration, pro-lockdown leftist views. Is that accurate?” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked the FBI deputy director.

“I haven’t seen it directly, but I believe, from what I’ve been told, that is accurate with the Gab account,” Abbate said in response to her question. “We’re still working to certify and verify that that’s his account also, but it does have differing points of view, it would appear.”