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Footage has surfaced showing Thomas Matthew Crooks being bullied in high school. As The Shade Room previously reported, Crooks attempted to assassinate Donald Trump on Saturday, July 13.
According to TMZ, footage captured “a few years ago” of Crooks while he was in high school surfaced online on Monday, July 15. As The Shade Room previously reported, Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022.
In the resurfaced footage, Crooks is seen sitting at a school desk wearing a red and blue sweater, blue jeans, and blue sneakers. The arm of another student sitting in front of him is seen pulling on the cuff of his jeans.
“Stop,” Crook repeatedly says before later adding. “You’re pulling my leg.”
In the video, Crooks does not appear to be explicitly distressed but seems to be attempting to calmly quell the disturbance. As the footage plays, laughs can be heard in the background.
Check out the footage below.
The resurfaced footage of Crooks appears to confirm some accounts recently shared about the 20-year-old by his former high school classmates. As The Shade Room previously reported, Jason Koehler described Crooks as someone who “was bullied almost every day.”
“I mean, he would sit alone at lunch. I mean, he was just an outcast, and you know how kids are nowadays — so they’re gon’ see someone like that, and they’re gonna target him because they think it’s funny or whatever… and it’s honestly kind of sad,” Koehler recently told NBC News. “I don’t want to say this is what provoked it, but you never know.”
Koehler added that Crooks was largely bullied due to the military-style clothing he wore to school. Despite this, classmates Jameson Myers and Summer Barkley appeared “shocked” by Crooks’ assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
“I never have thought him capable of anything I’ve seen him do in the last few days,” Myers reportedly told CBS News.
The footage of Crooks being bullied at Bethel Park High School isn’t the only clip that’s surfaced of him as a student. On Sunday, July 14, commentator Vince Dao took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to share footage of an advertisement for BlackRock.
The advertisement was reportedly produced in 2022, per CBS News. The outlet adds that the company is “the world’s largest asset manager.” Furthermore, the ad that featured Crooks was “part of a series aimed at teachers managing their retirement assets.”
Check out a clip of the ad and Crooks’ appearance below.
According to the outlet, BlackRock has confirmed Crooks’ appearance in the ad. Additionally, the company noted that it has “removed the video from circulation.”
To note, Crooks was not paid for his appearance or hired by the company as an actor.
“In 2022, we ran an ad featuring a teacher from Bethel Park High School, in which several unpaid students briefly appeared in the background, including Thomas Matthew Crooks. We will make all video footage available to the appropriate authorities, and we have removed the video from circulation out of respect for the victims,” the company stated to the outlet. “The assassination attempt on former President Trump is abhorrent. We’re thankful former President Trump wasn’t seriously injured and thinking about all the innocent bystanders and victims of this awful act, especially the person who was killed…”
As The Shade Room previously reported, Crooks killed a 50-year-old man and critically injured two others while grazing Donald Trump’s ear with a bullet in an apparent attempt to end his life at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Crooks’ political affiliation remains unclear despite his initial registration as a Republican voter, per CNN. Additionally, the outlet notes that FBI investigators are “working hard to determine the sequence of events related to the subject and his movements in the hours, days and weeks prior to the shooting.”
CBS News notes that Crooks’ motive for the shooting “remains unknown.”
