‘He owned his political views, and I don’t think he was scared to share them,’ a former classmate said of Thomas Matthew Crooks.
The man accused of attempting to assassinate former president Donald Trump was quiet and extremely smart, had a deep interest in politics, and did not seem threatening, two former classmates of his told National Review.
Max Smith, who graduated from Bethel Park High School in Pennsylvania in 2022 with Thomas Matthew Crooks, the alleged shooter, said his former classmate was “definitely a loner.”
“I don’t think he really had many friends,” Smith said when reached on his cellphone on Sunday afternoon. “I don’t think anybody was really super close to him.”
Another former classmate, who asked that his name not be released, said that Crooks was “extremely bright” and excelled in advanced government, politics, and history classes. “He crushed in every single one of those courses.”
While both of his former classmates agreed that Crooks was quiet, they said he was not shy about expressing his views. “He owned his political views, and I don’t think he was scared to share them,” said Smith, who recalled Crooks occasionally engaging in spirited arguments before and after classes. “It wasn’t like anything crazy,” he said.
However, the two former classmates said they weren’t clear about where, exactly, Crooks fell on the political spectrum. Smith said he believed Crooks’s politics were more on the conservative side, while the other former classmate thought Crooks was more left-wing.
“The views that he was purporting at school were the opposite of the ones I would associate with someone who was a gunsmith,” the former classmate said.
While Crooks, 20, was a registered Republican, he donated $15 to the left-wing Progressive Turnout Project in January 2021, on the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Neither of Crooks’s former classmates said that they ever thought of him as threatening or dangerous. “He was definitely quiet, but he didn’t give any sort of menacing, sort of fist-clenched kind of vibes about him,” Smith said.
Other classmates and a teacher reached by National Review said they didn’t really know Crooks or declined to talk about him.
Smith said that former classmates he has spoken with since Saturday’s shooting are shocked that Crooks was involved. “I think just the fact that we lived with him and he sat next to us . . . it’s just surreal,” he said.
Smith described his former school as being “on the nicer side of things,” and he said he didn’t want the school or the school district to get a “bad rap” because of the shooting.
Authorities believe that shortly after 6 p.m. on Saturday, Crooks fired shots at Trump while he was speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa. Trump was shot in the ear and is safe, but one rally-goer was killed, and at least two others were critically injured.
Crooks was killed by Secret Service agents at the scene.
Witnesses reported seeing a man with a rifle bear-crawling up to the roof of a nearby building before shots were fired. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why is Trump still speaking? Why have they not pulled him off the stage?” a man identified only as Greg told the BBC on Saturday. “The next thing you know, five shots ring out.”