The 20-year-old man who shot and nearly killed President Donald Trump last year was seen in new online videos preparing for the attack as he wields his weapons in a series of trial runs.
Thomas Crooks, who was shot and killed after firing eight high-caliber rifle rounds at Trump on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Penn., practiced his firearm skills in his bedroom where he filmed himself going through the motions of how he planned to carry out his attack. The footage was first obtained by Candace Owens, who claimed on her podcast that she accessed it from Crooks’s deleted social media history.
It’s unclear how much earlier the footage from Crooks’s cell phone was taken before the shooting aimed at Trump.
In a brief clip, Crooks can be seen mounting his phone to show off a handgun lying on the quilt of his bed. He then grabs a long gun which he pretends to fire at an imaginary target.
Crooks assumed a marksman’s stance in his sparsely decorated bedroom, where he was surrounded by chalk-white walls except for a Marvel movie poster.
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A second video shows Crooks aiming his handgun toward a paper target that he mounted on the wall. He took the same stance and pretended to empty his unloaded firearm.
Owens reported about Crooks’s internet activity left in recent years, including a trail of violent comments left underneath YouTube videos that were often about politics.
One comment from 2019 allegedly left by Crooks read, “I always believed being patriotic was lining up a bunch of socialist jews (like the ones that booed Trump) and blasting their useless brains out with an AR.”
Crooks’s account also wrote that year, “Everyone of the Trump hating democrats deserve to have their heads chopped off and put on stakes for the world to see what happens when you f**k with America.”
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A haunting history of search results shows that Crooks was fascinated with mass casualties, how to build explosives, and school shooters, the Daily Mail reported.
Other searches suggest that Crooks spent months planning his attack. One week before the Pennsylvania shooting, he searched “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?”
Right before he fired at Trump, one of Crooks’s final search results had to do with pornography. He also looked up Molotov cocktails, fertilizer bombs, and the best places for a mass shooting, according to Owens.
“His online history shows he was extraordinarily violent,” she said.
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