Nearly 48 hours after last Saturday’s attack on Donald Trump at a rally at a farmers’ fair in Pennsylvania, the mystery surrounding its perpetrator, Thomas Matthew Crooks, remains a puzzle with too many pieces missing. The main question is what motivated a 20-year-old with a moderate involvement in politics to climb onto the roof of an industrial building and open fire with his AR-15 rifle on the Republican, slightly wounding him, and on a crowd of his supporters; one of them died instantly and two others were left in critical condition.
Crooks’ digital footprint, although it is hard to believe in these times, is not helping FBI agents investigating the case, classified as an incident of “domestic terrorism” given that the boy, who acted alone, was carrying explosives in the trunk of his car on Saturday. There is no trace of the classic blog in which the guy released his jeremiads; nor of a skein on his social networks that gives clues to a descent down the slide of conspiracies.
Authorities have found no history of mental health problems. He was registered as a Republican voter and in 2020 gave money to the Democratic cause. His classmates at the Bethel Park (Pennsylvania) high school, where he graduated that year, described to the newspaper’s reporters Philadelphia Inquireran archetypal portrait in these cases: a shy boy, with few friends, and a victim of torment by the class bullies.
The photos that have emerged of him are from that time. An unexpected trail of a moving image also emerged, an ad that the investment firm Black Rock shot with Bethel Park High School students as extras, including Crooks. The company announced Sunday that it was pulling the ad.
A firefighter, the fatal victim
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The identities of the victims have only been revealed in the last few hours. The dead man is Corey Comperatore, a staunch Trump supporter and a firefighter by profession, who, according to witnesses, “died like a hero” protecting his family. The injured are David Dutch, 57, from New Kensington, and James Copenhaver, 74, from Moon Township, two towns in Pennsylvania. The condition of both is stable, according to the state police.
The spotlight is increasingly turning unflattering on what went wrong with the event’s security. Experts are at a loss to understand how a building about 150 metres from the stage could have been left outside the protected area. One of the few watchtowers in that rural area. The perfect place for a sniper. In a message to the nation from the Oval Office, the scene of major occasions, President Biden on Sunday called for an “independent review” of the security measures before and after the attack. He also ordered the Secret Service to step up surveillance for the Republican National Convention, which began on Monday in Milwaukee.
The event is being held at the Bucks’ basketball court, and to get in you have to navigate dozens of closed streets, security arches, and one agent after another checking the credentials of the attendees, some 50,000 of them, including delegates, various personalities, journalists, and some 5,000 volunteers like Paul Nelson, an army veteran who arrived on a trip he paid for himself from San Jose (California). Early Monday morning, Nelson said that he participated in the 2016 convention, and that at that time he already supported Trump, “even though it seemed like he was going to lose the election.” “The bullets passed just a few centimeters away from him,” Nelson said. [en el mitin del sábado]”If that bastard had hit him, the president’s head would have exploded live on air like a watermelon. We should be grateful that he is still with us,” he added.
There are also questions about whether the officers who descended on Trump to protect the former president’s life with their bodies took too long to remove him from the stage, while he apparently tried to retrieve his shoes. Nor did it seem a very good idea to allow him to peek out from the mass of bodies to, once again an easy target, raise his fist, even if that allowed an AP photographer to take an image that will go down in history, the composition of which has since been analyzed as if it were that of Las Meninas or, better yet, of The descent, by Van der Weyden.
Kimberly Cheatle, director of the Secret Service, is facing the biggest crisis in the institution in decades. Cheatle has been with the force for almost 30 years and worked in Biden’s entourage when he was vice president. The memory of the scandals that have plagued the agency in recent years due to the less than virtuous behavior of some of its members is still fresh; the most serious occurred in Colombia, involving several prostitutes and ending with the dismissal of nine agents. In a message sent to her people on Sunday that she obtained The New York Times, Cheatle wrote: “The attempted assassination of former President Trump will be remembered in history. The Secret Service acted quickly in this situation and neutralized the threat.”
By Monday, almost no one thinks that anymore, and her position as director is definitely in jeopardy because of an incident that has revived memories of the assassination attempt on Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. It was in Millwaukee, of course. Roosevelt was also a former president at the time, like Trump, and also campaigning to return to the White House. He survived, but less than a month later he lost the election.
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