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The FBI has named the man who shot Donald Trump as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican from Pennsylvania.
Crooks was reportedly wearing a t-shirt bearing the emblem of a pro-gun Youtube channel when he was killed on Saturday by a special forces sniper after firing three shots at the former US president.
One shot grazed Trump’s ear, spraying blood across his face. A man sitting behind Trump was shot and died and two other people were badly injured.
The FBI said that it regarded Crooks as carrying out “an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump”.
“This remains an active and ongoing investigation,” it said.
Suspects home raided
Reports said that heavily-armed US security agents have raided Crooks’ home in Bethel Park on the edge of Pittsburgh, roughly an hour’s drive south of Butler, the small and hard-up post-industrial town where he tried to kill Trump.
The FBI said that Crooks was not carrying any identification when he made the assassination attempt and had to be identified using DNA samples.
“We don’t currently have an identified motive, although our investigators are working tirelessly to attempt to identify what that motive was,” said Kevin Rojek, an FBI Pittsburgh special agent.
AR-15 semi-automatic rifle recovered
Crooks shot at Trump from the roof of a shed outside the security cordon thrown up around the rally in a park in central Butler at around 6.15 pm local time, shortly after the former US president had started speaking.
Witnesses said Crooks “bear crawled” across a rooftop less than 100m away from Trump, the Republican presidential candidate frontrunner. They said that Crooks then spent two or three minutes steadying himself, before taking aim and firing at Trump.
US security forces said that they had recovered an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle lying by Crook’s body. AR-15 semi-automatic rifles have been used in several mass shootings in the US and have become the focus of the gun debate.
Photos also showed a member of the US security forces standing over Crooks’ body. Crooks was wearing beige cargo-style shorts and a grey T-shirt bearing the logo of a pro-gun Youtube channel called Demolition Ranch.
A registered Republican
Videos and photos on the internet showed Crooks to be a tall, slender, white man who wore glasses and had long sandy-brown hair.
Voter-registration data showed that Crooks was a registered Republican voter but on Jan 20, 2021, two weeks after pro-Trump alt-right supporters stormed the White House, Crooks gave $15 to a grassroots Democratic group.
Crooks didn’t have a criminal record. A video showed him graduating from a local school in 2022 and winning a prize for maths and science.
The shooter’s father told CNN he was trying to find out “what the hell” was going on but that he would talk to law enforcement before speaking about his son.
The post Thomas Matthew Crooks: Who was the Donald Trump shooting suspect? appeared first on The Telegraph.
