The last search Thomas Crooks made on his cell phone before attempting to assassinate Donald Trump was for pornography, a senior law enforcement source tells the Daily Beast.
The source, who asks not to be named, said the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Va., made the discovery when it finally gained access to the contents of 20-year-old Crooks’ encrypted Samsung phone. Initial attempts at the Pittsburgh field office to crack open the Android failed and the device was flown to Quantico on an FBI plane.
The only other recent activity on the phone which the FBI discovered were texts from his parents asking where he was. The source says the parents thought their son had taken the AR-style rifle and gone to the shooting range where he sometimes practiced.
The texts began around 1 pm and continued throughout the afternoon.
“By 6 pm he was dead,” the source said.
According to the source, the FBI has largely completed its examination of the phone’s contents and is now at work on the gunman’s laptop and a number of hard drives which were recovered from his bedroom.
The agents hope to find clues as to why someone with no clear political motivation or a known psychiatric disorder clambered upon a rooftop at a Trump rally in Butler, Pa. with an assault rifle and attempted to kill Trump.
He only grazed the former president, but wounded two rally attendees, one fatally before he was killed by a Secret Service Counter Sniper Team. The former president said during his speech to the Republican National Convention on Thursday that the Secret Service used a single bullet to kill Crooks.
Along with four rifle magazines beside Crooks’ body, agents found a remote control capable of detonating explosives discovered in his vehicle.
The discovery of searches for pornography did not surprise law enforcement. “It’s not unusual,” the source said, noting that Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooter Adam Lanza had images of child abuse on his phone and that numerous al Qaeda suspects have been found to have searched for extreme pornography along with tracts for Islamist purity.
But it will add to the picture FBI profilers are building of Crooks, who lived with his parents 40 miles from the Trump rally venue. He had graduated community college and was working in a skilled nursing and rehabilitation center near his home.
Other reporting has revealed that he searched for both Trump and for Joe Biden. He also looked for information on the Democratic National Convention and members of the British royal family.
Early Friday, CNN reported that he searched for information about Ethan Crumbley, the mass shooter who murdered four students at his Michigan high school in 2021. Crooks also searched for information about the prosecution of Crumbley’s parents, CNN reported. They were both sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in prison for not securing the handgun which he used to commit the mass shooting.
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