(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Daily Mail interviewed one of alleged Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks’s former classmates, who said that the failed assassin threatened to “shoot up” his high school when he was just 15-years old. Crooks was 20 when he died on Saturday.
“We had like this anonymous place you could post things or tell on someone on our computers at school and he posted something like, ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow,’ and something else that made it sound like he’d put bombs in the cafeteria bathrooms,” said the former classmate, 20-year-old Vincent Taormina.
“Half of us just didn’t come to school the next day – I didn’t. But it wasn’t taken seriously. We all texted one another and it came out pretty quickly that it was Thomas and his friend group who’d made the threats to shoot [the school] up,” Taormina told the Daily Mail.
While authorities didn’t take Crooks’s threat seriously at the time, the FBI is apparently investigating it now.
Taormina’s interview with the Daily Mail follows a separate interview he provided to Fox News, where he said Crooks was an anti-Trumper. He also mentioned the school shooting plot in his Fox interview.
“Everybody was saying it was Thomas who made a threat, and it was that friend group. Everyone was mainly blaming the friend group, but a name that kept coming up was Thomas,” Taormina told Fox News. “And he never did anything, you know. I mean, he left school for a couple of days.”
Additionally, the former classmate pushed back against rumors that Crooks was severely bullied in high school.
“I could name you a few students who were severely bullied, and I remember their names. He’s not one of them,” said Taormina, referring to Crooks.
According to Taormina, there were plenty of signs regarding Crooks, and he said that there was no way that somebody else couldn’t have seen it coming.
“Somebody should have known, because he was not a loner. And with both of his parents being counselors, how do you not see that warning sign?” said Taormina. “People are going to get their fares in order before they do something this bold and this drastic—and nobody saw it?”
The fallout from the assassination attempt at the July 13 Trump rally in Pennsylvania continues to worsen, as investigators seek to find a motive behind Crooks’ attempt on the former President’s life.
As of Friday, the FBI was reportedly trying to access communications Crooks had on at least three encrypted platforms, whose servers are located overseas. According to Axios, the FBI has served legal processes on 30 companies, and is waiting on returns from 18 of those companies, including the ones running the foreign encrypted applications.
The assassination attempt has landed the Secret Service in hot water, as the Department of Homeland Security reportedly sought to prevent a briefing between the House Oversight Committee and Director Kimberly Cheatle demanding answers over the handling of the incident.
Cheatle is still set to testify publicly before the Oversight Committee on Monday.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
