(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The public still doesn’t know much about the 20-year-old man who shot Donald Trump’s ear at his July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—but a report from the Task Force formed to investigate the shooting revealed more information about the alleged shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks’s mental state on Tuesday.
The House Task Force’s final report said the shooter’s father, Matthew Crooks, noticed his son’s declining mental health over the last year. The father and mother, Mary Crooks, are reportedly both licensed professional counselors, according to the Pennsylvania Social Work Board.
Matthew Crooks told law enforcement that his son’s mental health began to decline soon after he graduated community college.
Matthew Crooks told police he began noticing his son Thomas's mental health decline shortly after he graduated community college, according to this PSP report excerpt included in the Task Force's final report.
The Task Force did not disclose any other excerpts of the PSP report. pic.twitter.com/JD7tCh3JgM— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) December 10, 2024
“Crooks’ father explained that within the last year, he observed several instances of his son dancing in his bedroom throughout the night,” states a Pennsylvania State Police report, a small excerpt of which was included in the Task Force’s Tuesday final report.
“He would occasionally see Crooks talking to himself with his hands moving, which he expressed as uncommon and had become more prevalent after he had finished his last semester at Community College.”
Crooks’s father also told police that his son used illegal drugs and said Crooks was “not known to be prescribed to any medication,” the Task Force report said—an assertion supported by Crooks’s toxicology reports, which this publication exclusively obtained and published in October.
The Task Force’s final report is the first official source of Crooks’s declining mental health, though similar information about him was leaked to the media months ago.
CBS initially reported information about Crooks’s possible mental health disorders on July 18, citing sources from a private congressional briefing with federal law enforcement officials.
According to CBS, the FBI purportedly found more than 14,000 images on Crooks’ primary phone. Among those images was a screenshot of an online live feed of the July 13 rally, saved at 6:01 p.m.—just 10 minutes before he allegedly opened fire.
“He searched online in April about major depressive disorder. In the days after the rally was announced, he made searches related to Trump, President Biden, the former president’s whereabouts on July 13 and the Democratic National Convention,” CBS reported—indicating that Crooks may have been suffering from mental ailments.
Task Force member Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., said last week he thinks Crooks “went mad.”
