Mystery around Trump shooter deepens

BETHEL PARK, Pa.—Two days after Thomas Matthew Crooks committed one of the most shocking acts of political violence in half a century, both investigators and people in his western Pennsylvania community are no closer to understanding why he did it.

The FBI has analyzed Crooks’s cellphone and has found nothing that explains why he climbed a roof and fired a shot at former President Trump, law-enforcement officials said. Crooks’s parents have spoken to law enforcement, but they also seemed to have little insight, telling authorities he didn’t appear to have any strong political leanings and had few, if any, friends.

The attempted assassination looked likely to drive the country to new levels of partisan distrust, but the initial mixed picture of the bespectacled young gunman of a quiet loner who wasn’t politically outspoken has instead left most of the American public scratching its head.

His most recent employer, a nursing home called Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, said that he had performed his job without concern and that his background check was clean.

A neighbor in the Crooks family’s Bethel Park neighborhood on Monday said he remembered Crooks as a polite child who would come over to play with his children in his backyard when they were younger. “He was quiet, maybe a little bit different," the neighbor said, adding that many children are.

Crooks had been a member at a shooting range a half-hour drive from Bethel Park, on a hilltop at the end of a long, wooded drive, the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club. He was a member for about a year, an official for the club said, adding that he too had no inkling of what was to come.

“We knew very little about him," he said in a brief phone interview. “It was a