School threats to presidential attack: Unraveling Thomas Crooks' past
The "Daily Mail" reveals that the assailant who fired at Donald Trump had threatened a shooting at his high school when he was just 15 years old. At the time, the incident was not taken seriously. The FBI is now investigating the matter.
On Thursday, federal officials met with Thomas Crooks' former classmate, Vincent Taormina. The authorities questioned him about the attacker's "hatred" of politicians and the threats Crooks allegedly made as a freshman at Bethel Park High School.
In an interview with the "Daily Mail," Taormina said, "We had like this anonymous place you could post things or tell on someone on our computers at school, and he posted something like 'Don't come to school tomorrow,' and something else that made it sound like he'd put bombs in the cafeteria bathrooms."
"Half of us just didn't come to school the next day – I didn't. But it wasn't taken seriously," says Crooks' former classmate.
"We all texted one another, and it came out pretty quickly that it was Thomas and his friend group who'd made the threats to shoot [the school] up," added Taormina.
Classmates remember him as an "outcast"
Media reached Thomas Crooks' schoolmates. The students describe him as an "outcast" who was "bullied every day." Crooks was a "loner" who was "bullied so much in high school," as described by his ex-classmate, Jason Kohler.
"He would sit alone at lunch. He was just the outcast. He wasn’t, like, with the clique, so he always had, I guess, a target on his back. He was bullied so much," says the man.
ABC News also contacted people who attended Bethel Park High School with Crooks. Former classmates described him as a "quiet" student who didn't have many friends. "A smart but solitary student who walked through the halls with his head down and rarely raised his hand in class," said a student, as the "New York Times" reported.
