Our leaders would have us believe that Thomas Matthew Crooks was a “wild lunatic” who, driven “crazy” by a prescription drug, sought to kill then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. However, investigators, classmates, and teachers say this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Will we ever know the whole truth?

From The New York Post. It’s been almost nine months since a seemingly mild-mannered 20-year-old attempted to assassinate then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a rally in Butler. …

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Sources told The Post the FBI has obstructed efforts to solve the mystery of why Thomas Matthew Crooks, who left no manifesto, did what he did. It’s left local law enforcement as well as Crooks’ former friends, classmates and teachers frustrated. …

A veteran private investigator from Erie, Pa., who was hired shortly after the fateful July 13 event at the Butler rally to look into Crooks by a private client, told The Post he believes a “criminal network” was operating with him at the time of the assassination attempt, is still in existence and still wants to kill President Trump.

Doug Hagmann, whose team of six other investigators have been working the case for months and have interviewed more than 100 people, said they also conducted extensive geofencing analysis of cellphones and tablets not belonging to Crooks that were found with him at his home, at the rifle range where he took target practice, at the rally and at Bethel Park High School, where he graduated in 2022.

“We don’t think he acted alone,” Hagmann told The Post. …

Hagmann said he was personally escorted to the Butler County line and told to leave twice during the course of his team’s investigation. The people who did so were either federal agents or some type of private security. …

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who has also been investigating Crooks’ assassination attempt for months, has not seen Hagmann’s geofencing data but downplayed their significance. He told The Post he believes Crooks acted alone and there was no conspiracy. …

But Higgins admitted that even after months of his granular, boots-on-the-ground research … he has only one theory.

He thinks Crooks must have been on some sort of prescription drug that made him, in Higgins’ words, “go crazy.”

But the Pittsburgh County medical examiner, strangely, did not perform toxicological tests for pharmaceuticals — or at least did not include them in the autopsy report. …

“Something happened to make him go crazy and that’s why I think it might have been pharmaceuticals. He performed an attempted assassination and he was committed all the way through — to death. He was not acting erratic but he was a wild lunatic at the same time, incredibly calculating and incredibly smart.”

But terms like “wild lunatic” and “incredibly calculating” are not adjectives that any of the former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends whom The Post interviewed during a week in the Bethel Park area used to describe Crooks. …

Many of them said that the narrative about Crooks in the media in the first days after the shooting — that he was a troubled loner, wore military fatigues and camo clothing, threatened to shoot up his high school in 2019 and was rejected by his school’s rifle club — were all lies.

“He was my little buddy,” teacher Xavier Harmon, 48, who had Crooks in his computer technology class at Steel Center for Career and Technical Education for two years, told The Post last week. …

Harmon and other teachers both from his high school and at the Community College of Allegheny County, where he graduated in 2024 with an engineering degree, said there was no indication Crooks was on any type of substance — legal or illegal. …

“I don’t think he set out to kill the president,” Harmon said. “My guess is, he messed with the wrong individuals about what they were going to do and it was different from what he thought it was going to be. Anyone planning to do this would leave some sort of breadcrumbs. But there’s nothing — no paperwork, no itinerary, no even [him] going to websites to [research].”

Jim Knapp, who was a longtime guidance counselor and sports coach at Bethel Park High School before his recent retirement, knew Crooks’ parents and older sister, Katie, 23, before he knew Thomas. …

Knapp, a devout Catholic, says “something happened” to Crooks between the time he graduated from high school in 2022 and the shooting 18 months later.

“I believe evil exists in the world and the devil caused him to snap. Something got into his brain and controlled it. The devil fed on him and got him, hook, line and sinker.” …

Sister Katie, who works as a janitor at a nearby school, lives in a drab apartment building about a mile away. Two older men came to the door of the building when The Post arrived, saying she did not want to be disturbed and warning a reporter, “The story is dead. Remember that.” …

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(Excerpt from The New York Post. Photo Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)