Years before Thomas Crooks tried to assassinate a former president at a rally Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, he was linked to threats to shoot up his school.
That was the disturbing conclusion from a Fox News interview with a former classmate of Crooks at Bethel Park High School.
Vincent Taormina told the outlet that the crowd Crooks ran in was suspected of being behind word of a school shooting plan.
“A name that kept coming up was ‘Thomas,’” he said.
Taormina did not offer details and his story was unconfirmed, but he said the incident occurred his freshman year.
Since Crooks was 20 years old, that would put it in the 2016-2017 range.
“Everyone’s going through Snapchat, everyone’s texting everybody, everyone saying this, that and the third. Everybody was saying it was Thomas who made a threat and it was that friend group,” Taormina told Fox News.
“Everyone was mainly blaming the friend group, but a name that kept coming up was ‘Thomas.’”
Taormina said nothing resulted from the threat, but Crooks was out of school for a time.
“It wasn’t anything like a suspension or anything,” he said. “It was just a couple of days.”
It can’t be stressed enough that this is an unconfirmed account. But it could well be an indicator that Crooks was — or should have been — at least on someone’s radar.
His almost-successful assassination attempt on Trump has already brought calls for Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign. More revelations like the account Taormina gave Fox News could make local school and law enforcement officials look bad as well.
Taormina also recalled Crooks as being passionately unhappy with the country’s leading politicians — in 2016, those included Trump as well as Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. And Crooks didn’t like the fact that Taormina was a Hispanic Trump supporter.
“I brought up the fact that I’m Hispanic and I’m for Trump, and he said, ‘Well, you’re Hispanic, so shouldn’t you hate Trump?’ And I was like, ‘No. He’s great.’ …
“And he called me stupid. Or insinuated that I was stupid.”
Of course, young people say stupid things all the time. And Taormina described Crooks as a “know it all” who came across as arrogant — which describes a fair percentage of male 13-year-olds.
But does anyone doubt that if a bullet had come within millimeters of killing President Joe Biden instead of Trump on Saturday, and if the shooter had been a 20-year-old with a history that included even remotely disparaging remarks about Biden, the establishment media would be chock-a-block with accounts of the gunman’s youth and the obvious threat “right-wing extremism” poses to the nation’s safety?
Should Thomas Crooks have been on local law enforcement’s radar?
If a would-be Biden assassin had been linked to a suspected school shooting plot in his youth, the liberal media would be blanketing the country with its coverage right now.
But like the 2017 attack on congressional Republicans by a deranged Sanders supporter — an attack that almost killed GOP Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana — the attempted assassination of Trump gets treated differently.
But Americans know it.
