Newly released FBI records show the 20-year-old who opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, ordered packages under a fake name for months, and an unidentified donor quietly paid to have his body cremated just days after the shooting.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, resident who killed one rallygoer and seriously wounded two others at President Donald Trump's July 13, 2024, campaign event, used the alias "Bob Dole" to receive deliveries at his family's home, federal documents reviewed by Fox News Digital show. The records, turned over to the Senate as part of the ongoing investigation, paint a portrait of a socially isolated young man whose family says they never saw the violence coming.
The documents landed after the FBI compiled investigative files on Crooks and provided them to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley. They confirm that Crooks adopted the "Dole" pseudonym after his father Matthew's checking account was hacked and hit with fraudulent gambling charges, a detail that apparently prompted the younger Crooks to start routing purchases under a false name. He timed his pickups carefully, collecting packages before his father returned from late shifts.
What was in those packages remains unknown. The FBI documents do not describe their contents. But the alias itself, borrowed from the late Kansas senator and presidential candidate, adds another layer of oddity to a case that, more than a year later, still has no confirmed motive.
FBI agents interviewed Matthew and Mary Crooks the day after the shooting. The father, who worked in the mental health field, told investigators his son "never identified anyone as a friend throughout middle school and high school." Thomas socialized with classmates, the elder Crooks said, but told his father those classmates were not actually his friends.
The picture that emerges from the records is stark. Just The News reported that Matthew Crooks described his son as emotionally detached from birth, rarely laughing, rarely displaying strong emotions. The father said he never developed a real father-son bond with Thomas.
Yet Crooks was academically gifted. He scored a 1400 on his first SAT attempt without studying, a result that would place him well above the national average. After preparing, he retook the test and broke 1500. He was a straight-A student. He feared he might not get into college anyway.
Between his freshman and sophomore years of high school, Crooks's behavior shifted. He became quieter and had difficulty speaking with teachers. At one point, he floated the idea of joining the military to work on nuclear submarines, though the documents note it was unclear how serious he was about that plan.
In the months before the shooting, Matthew Crooks noticed his son talking to himself. Despite working in mental health, the father told investigators he did not observe other signs of a potential mental illness. Thomas's actions on July 13, the family said, came as a complete surprise.
A former classmate offered a different angle. Jason Kohler told the Associated Press that Crooks "was bullied almost every day" and was "just an outcast." Kohler's account suggests the isolation the father described was visible to peers as well.
One of the most puzzling details in the records involves what happened to Crooks's body. A family attorney told investigators that Thomas had been cremated shortly after the shooting, and that an anonymous donor covered the cost. The identity of that donor has not been disclosed.
The New York Post, which first reported the documents, noted that the FBI released the body for cremation just 10 days after the shooting. The rapid turnaround drew sharp criticism from Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican, who had attempted to examine the body on August 5, 2024, only to discover it had already been destroyed.
Higgins said the discovery "caused quite a stir and revealed a disturbing fact." The Crooks family's financial situation may explain the need for outside help: Matthew Crooks was unemployed at the time of the shooting, and Mary Crooks had gone on leave from her job. Matthew later took early retirement. But the question of who paid, and why, remains open.
The speed of the cremation matters because it eliminated the possibility of independent forensic examination. For lawmakers pressing the FBI and Secret Service for answers, that lost opportunity is not a minor footnote. It is a gap in the evidentiary record that cannot be filled. Earlier FBI disclosures revealed that Crooks had practiced for the attack over a period of years and concealed purchases under a fake name, a pattern that investigators are still working to reconstruct.
The FBI documents about Crooks's background land alongside a broader investigation into how a 20-year-old with a rifle reached a rooftop within clear sight of a presidential candidate. A bipartisan Senate report released in September 2024 found the Secret Service's failures at Butler were "shocking, unacceptable, and preventable."
National Review reported that Secret Service personnel learned about a suspicious person carrying a rangefinder near the AGR building, the structure Crooks used as his firing position, a full 27 minutes before the shooting. That information never reached lead personnel on the ground. Two separate communications centers operated at the rally, one for the Secret Service and one for local law enforcement, running on different radio channels. The Secret Service failed to record its own transmissions.
Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, said someone "needs to be held accountable for these egregious failures," accusing the Secret Service, DHS, FBI, ATF, and other federal agencies of "continued obstruction" of the bipartisan investigation. Sen. Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat who co-led the inquiry, called the communication breakdowns and planning missteps unacceptable.
Rallygoers had noticed Crooks acting suspiciously near security checkpoints before the shooting, prompting a search that failed to locate him in time. A local officer encountered Crooks on the roof but had to retreat down a ladder before Crooks opened fire. Secret Service snipers then shot and killed him. Crooks had used an AR-style rifle believed to have been purchased by his father, and investigators found bomb-making materials in his car.
The Washington Examiner reported that FBI specialists eventually gained access to Crooks's phone and began analyzing its contents, though the bureau acknowledged the investigation was still in its early stages at that point. What the phone revealed, if anything, has not been made public in the documents released so far.
Multiple federal reviews have since catalogued the Secret Service policy failures and missed warnings that preceded the Butler rally. The AGR building, which offered a direct line of sight to the stage, had been left to local law enforcement without specific instructions, even after local emergency services warned they lacked the manpower to cover it.
For all the new detail about Crooks's personality, habits, and alias, the most important question remains unanswered. His motive is still a mystery. The FBI has treated the shooting as a potential act of domestic terrorism but has found no clear ideological driver. Crooks displayed political ambiguity, a detail that has frustrated investigators and the public alike.
The documents provided to Chairman Grassley represent one piece of a still-incomplete puzzle. Senators have said they are waiting on records from multiple federal agencies. The Secret Service's own internal communications failures have compounded the problem, making it harder to reconstruct the chain of decisions that left a presidential candidate exposed.
Meanwhile, the threat environment around the president and his family has not eased. Ongoing security concerns surrounding the Trump family underscore just how high the stakes remain, and how costly the institutional failures at Butler truly were.
A young man with no friends, no known motive, and a borrowed name came within inches of changing American history. The institutions charged with preventing that outcome failed at every turn. The least the public deserves now is a complete accounting, not a cremated evidence trail and a shrug.
