BY 8.45AM, THE stretch of Milford Drive that was home to Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot at Donald Trump, is already host to a traffic jam. Outside the Crookses’ home, dozens of journalists are setting up camp. Five gazebos sit on the carefully manicured grass, providing shade to news anchors, dressed in jackets, ties and comfortable trainers. Not much is happening. The vibe is that of a pride of lions lolling in the midday sun. A Reuters photographer brags about getting the shot of the morning. “Somebody is closing the drapes… you can just see the hand. Think, the hand of God, Maradona,” he jokes.
The entire world’s media are here, in Bethel Park, a suburb of Pittsburgh. There is a writer from Der Spiegel, the German magazine; another from the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest newspaper, and one more from the Epoch Times, the global newspaper of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China. But TV and wire agency men outnumber the newspaper people ten to one. Men heft camera lenses as long as their arms, or sprawl in camp chairs evidently carried at all times for such occasions.
They are all here trying to answer a question that has so far eluded the even more numerous ranks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: exactly what led Crooks, who worked at a nearby care home, to drive to Butler, a town 40 miles north, climb onto a factory roof with his father’s rifle, and shoot half a dozen or so bullets in the direction of the Republican presidential candidate. Readers and viewers want to know anything that might shed light on the motive of the first man to almost kill a president in 40 years. It is the world’s largest true-crime mystery, with sleuths professional and amateur on the case.
Any movement stirs the pack of journalists, who are hoping for some new detail. On the porch of the house opposite, Kelly Little (pictured), wearing a hoodie advertising the “Ann Arbor hash bash”, with a large picture of a cannabis leaf at its centre, is one of the only residents to have returned to the street. At around 10.30am, two FBI agents arrive, interview her and leave. Immediately the press pack jumps at the chance to find out what they asked. She offers disappointingly little. She says the agents asked her the same thing they have—what does she know about the family opposite? And that she replied in the same way—she knows nothing. “It shows you how much I pay attention to my neighbours,” she shrugs.
She is hardly alone in that. Interviews with Crooks’s school-mates suggest he was a quiet young man who was good at maths and interested in politics. But few seemed to know him well. He may have been bullied at school, or he may not have. He “definitely was conservative”, one classmate who studied American history with him told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Public records reveal he was registered as a Republican, and he was evidently into guns. But he left no “manifesto” or message behind, and he also donated $15 at one point to a liberal political action committee. On such morsels of information entire narratives are constructed. At least so far, no digital trail of planning or radicalisation has been revealed.
Bethel Park is hardly a place that seems likely to drive anybody to violence. It is made up of modest detached houses, on gentle winding roads. “It’s a great community,” says Jack Allen, the mayor. He is a Republican, but he says that politics hardly enters into local government. “The overall split is about 50/50, Democrats and Republicans,” he says, and he claims he cannot remember which of his colleagues on the municipal council are from which party. “Everyone works together, it doesn’t really come out.” It is a prosperous place, he says—the 33,000 residents include doctors, lawyers and government workers, many of whom commute to Pittsburgh. Walking around, your correspondent counted two Trump 2024 signs but also two rainbow “all are welcome” flags. American flags outnumbered both by orders of magnitude.
But then, the words “a quiet suburb where nothing happens” have been intoned by news anchors at the scenes of tragedies thousands of times before. For some journalists, this is a familiar ritual. When asked if he has seen anything like this before, a local photographer from UPI, a news agency, says a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue nearby in 2018 was the closest. “It was different but very similar,” he says. In that case, the shooter was an anti-Semite with a long history of online incitement. But many lack even that deranged logic. There have been 300 mass shootings so far this year already; five of them since Mr Trump was shot at, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks them. Perhaps the search of Crooks’s phone that FBI agents are now trying to conduct will reveal a motive. But equally it might not.
“I think everyone is shocked and surprised,” says Steve Riviere, who lives up the road from the Crookses, and who has come to keep Ms Little company. But then he adds, perhaps they shouldn’t be surprised. His daughter attends the school Crooks went to, and he remembers being texted once about a threat at the school. Nothing came of it and he ultimately dismissed it as a normal part of raising a child in America. Trying to make sense of shootings, he says: “I don’t think there are any reasons”. That Crooks’s bullets came so close to killing Mr Trump makes this shooting rare. But that detail aside, others like it happen all of the time.
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