Gun enthusiast reveals extraordinary new details after practicing shooting with ‘evil’ Thomas Matthew Crooks just weeks out from Trump assassination

A Pennsylvania gun enthusiast has revealed that he practiced with former President Trump’s assassin just weeks before the 20-year-old opened fire at a campaign rally.

Shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks and 63-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran Bill Jenkins enrolled in the same Handgun – Pistol 2 course at the Keystone Shooting Center in Cranberry, Pennsylvania on June 22.

The two were in the race when Crooks reportedly blasted a large hole in a target with a volley of precision bullets from his own 9mm pistol.

‘I sat next to evil,’ Jenkins told The Sun‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“This man murdered a man, a wife and children, and nearly brought chaos to the country by killing Donald Trump.”

When Jenkins first met Crooks, he noticed that “this kid was confident with guns.”

“When we got to the range, he just started shooting,” he said of Crooks.

“It appeared he had experience with weapons.”

Jenkins also noted that when they practiced shooting a target 10 yards away, Crooks “blew a big hole right through the centerpiece.

‘I congratulated him on his good performance and he just laughed.’

Crooks, Jenkins and their teacher then returned to the classroom, where the conversation took on a political character, according to Jenkins.

“It turned out that the instructor and I are Trump supporters,” he said.

“We talked about how great our country was under Trump. Our borders were secure, the economy was strong, we were energy independent, and he was getting things done.

‘I noticed at that moment that the boy didn’t say anything at all, but I saw him grin. He had a little smile.’

Jenkins said he didn’t think anything of it at the time. He thought Crooks was just quiet, but overall a “nice guy.”

“In retrospect, I think he bit his tongue,” he said after the July 13 shooting. “Nothing we discussed went over well with him.

“I’ve been thinking about whether that conversation was the one that pushed him over the edge?” Jenkins asked rhetorically, while the motive for the shooting remains unclear.

“It scares me a little bit because someone died,” he noted, referring to former firefighter Corey Comperatore.

Jenkins said he didn’t realize for several days that the man who opened fire at Trump’s rally was the same man he had trained with weeks earlier.

‘It wasn’t until I got a call from the FBI office in Pittsburgh on Tuesday while I was driving and asked about the course at Keystone that I found out.

“The guy said, ‘The other person in the class was the assailant who shot Trump,’ and I got all upset,” he said.

“When I looked at the pictures I saw it was him.”

He said the FBI agents asked him if Crooks had a bag on him. Jenkins said he did.

“I was sitting next to real evil, it really scares me,” Jenkins added. “He could have shot us at the range.

“He tried to throw the country into chaos. Maybe that was his motive – he wanted to create a real catastrophe in this country.”

Crooks arrived at Trump’s rally three hours before he opened fire, raising suspicions with the Secret Service because he was carrying a rangefinder used by hunters to take long-range shots.

Police even took a photo of Crooks an hour before the shooting.

But he was never arrested or questioned.

Crooks was later able to climb onto the roof of the building, which was over 100 metres away. He had a good view of the building, under the direct view of several participants in the demonstration. They tried to warn the police about the figure crawling across the roof with a gun in his hand.

“We saw a man like an army, like a bear, crawling across the roof of the building next to us, about 15 metres away,” Greg Smith told the BBC. “We could clearly see a gun.

“We were pointing at him, the police were running around down there on the ground, and we were like, ‘Hey man, there’s a guy on the roof with a gun’… and the police didn’t know what was going on.”

Smith said he tried to alert authorities but didn’t think they could see the shooter because of the slope of the roof.

“I thought to myself, ‘Why is Trump still speaking, why didn’t they take him off the stage?’ … and the next thing you know, five shots go off,” he said.

The criminals then shot Trump and killed retired volunteer fire chief Comperatore, before being killed on the spot by authorities.

Trump has since stated that “no one” told him about Crooks, despite the fact that he was being monitored “an hour” before the shooting.

“There were mistakes made,” Fox News’ Jesse Watters told Trump. “They had this guy under surveillance for an hour beforehand. Nobody told you you couldn’t go on stage?”

“Nobody mentioned it,” the former president responded. “Nobody said it was a problem.”

‘[They] could have said, ‘Let’s wait 15, 20 minutes, five minutes.’ Nobody said… I think that was a mistake,” he added.

Trump, and the rest of the United States, later wondered how Crooks had gotten onto the roof in the first place.

“How did somebody get on that roof?” Trump asked. “And why wasn’t he turned in, because people saw him on that roof.”

Trump revealed that security guards were alerted to someone with a gun on the roof before he even walked onstage. They didn’t stop him.

“When you hear Trumpers screaming, the woman in the red shirt, ‘There’s a man on the roof,’ and other people, ‘There’s a man on the roof and he’s got a gun,’ … that was quite a thing before I got on stage. And I thought someone would do something about it,” Trump said.

Trump suffered a minor injury, but the outcome could have been much worse if he hadn’t turned his head slightly at the last moment.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has been summoned to testify before a House committee Monday about the department’s response or face being fired or resigning.

Meanwhile, questions remain about Crooks’ motive.

He was a registered Republican and was described by his classmates as a true conservative, yet he donated money to a progressive movement in 2021.

A check of his phone revealed that the would-be assassin had sought information prior to the searches of Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Princess of Wales Kate Middleton.

He also looked for major depressive disorder, and doctors now say he fits the standard model of a mass murderer.

It was thought that Crooks felt excluded and invisible and that he sought a kind of immortality through his violent actions.

Dr Craig Hands, a clinical psychologist in California, told DailyMail.com: ‘In the case of the shooter, I can only assume from what I’ve heard that he fits a general profile in many respects.

‘It is indeed possible, I don’t know if he was depressed, but it could have contributed to his actions.

‘This depression creates isolation… there is a kind of burning ember-like depression that is associated with inner anger against yourself, and anger against the machine, as it were. Anger against the world.’

Major depressive disorder is a clinical diagnosis that causes a persistent feeling of deep sadness, hopelessness, loss of interest in activities, low energy, poor or increased appetite, difficulty concentrating, and suicidal thoughts and behavior.

Dr. Hands adds: ‘Most often, depression consists of criticism and anger at yourself, self-hatred.

‘I have to emphasize the term hate, hate for yourself, but often, or sometimes, that hate is projected outward.’

A 2015 study by Oxford University of approximately 47,000 people in Sweden, both with and without depression, found that people with depression about three times more than the general population commits a violent crime such as murder, aggravated assault or robbery.

However, it remains unclear whether Crooks has been diagnosed with the condition, which about 17 million adults in the US.