INVESTIGATIONS
A 20-year-old’s perplexing place in the catalogue of American gunmen

Thomas Matthew Crooks, who used a gun purchased by his father after the Sandy Hook massacre, evokes the profile of a mass shooter. Instead he fired at a former president.



A protester wields a sign bearing the image of Thomas Matthew Crooks, who tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump, outside the security zone at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

By John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich
July 21, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

In the months after an isolated, deeply troubled 20-year-old took his mother’s AR-style rifle and opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun sales in America exploded, partly fueled by the threat of a fresh ban on the assault weapons that would become the firearm of choice for some of the country’s most infamous killers.

Millions of Americans rushed to stock up, and among 2013’s gun buyers, investigators would later learn, was a man in western Pennsylvania whose son was also in elementary school. He purchased an AR-style rifle that fired 5.56mm rounds.
A decade later, his son — also isolated, troubled and 20 years old — shouldered that same rifle atop a sloped roof in Butler, Pa., and, according to authorities, fired it eight times in an apparent attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, shot and killed seconds later, remains enigmatic. A registered Republican who’d once given a $15 donation to a progressive group, he was, according to people who knew him, not overtly political or ideological. He did well in school, drew little attention in his middle-class, Bethel Park neighborhood. He didn’t leave behind a significant online presence or manifesto spelling out his motivation. Why he pulled the trigger, investigators still don’t know or, at least, have yet to say publicly.

Where he fits into the ever-expanding catalogue of notorious American gunmen could take years to understand, according to experts and historians. He’s hard to categorize, in part because his still-evolving portrait evokes the profile of a mass shooter, at least one of whom he researched. But Crooks wasn’t a mass shooter, instead becoming what some historians believe to be the youngest person to make an attempt on the life of a current or past president.

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Perry Stein and Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.

By John Woodrow Cox
John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. He is the author of Children Under Fire: An American Crisis and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Twitter

By Steven Rich
Steven Rich is the database editor for investigations at The Washington Post. He was a reporter on two teams to win Pulitzer Prizes, for public service in 2014 and national reporting in 2016, and two to teams to win Peabody Awards, in 2017 and 2022. Twitter