Federal documents compiled in the investigation into the 2024 shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania add two new details about Thomas Matthew Crooks: he used the alias “Bob Dole” while ordering suspicious packages, and an anonymous donor paid for his cremation after he was killed.
The records, turned over to the Senate and first reported by the New York Post, sharpen the picture of what investigators were piecing together after Crooks opened fire on July 13, 2024. He was shot and killed after the attack, which left a bystander dead and two others seriously wounded.
The alias matters because it was not random. Federal documents say Crooks adopted the name after his father’s checking account had been hacked and fraudulent gambling charges appeared. The records tie the false name to packages investigators described as suspicious, though they do not spell out in public detail what made them suspicious.
The same documents also show what happened after the shooting. A family attorney told investigators that Crooks had been cremated shortly thereafter, and that the bill was covered by an anonymous donor. That detail closes one practical question about the aftermath, even as it leaves the larger one untouched: why he used that alias in the first place.
Matthew Crooks told FBI agents that his son never identified anyone as a friend throughout middle school and high school, even though he socialized with classmates and said they were not his friends. He also said he saw Thomas Matthew Crooks talking to himself in the months before the shooting, but did not see other signs of a potential mental illness.
What the records do show is a boy who looked successful on paper and increasingly withdrawn in person. Matthew Crooks described his son as a straight-A student who scored a 1400 on his first SAT attempt without studying, then retook the SATs after studying and scored over 1500. He said his son feared he might not get into college, and that his behavior changed between his freshman and sophomore years of high school, when he became quieter and had a hard time speaking with teachers.
The documents do not explain whether the alias, the packages, and the anonymous cremation payment were connected to a broader plan or simply reflected the strange, fractured path investigators were reconstructing after the July 2024 attack. What they do make clear is that Crooks’s final days and the handling of his body were both bound up in the same inquiry, and that one of the most basic questions — why “Bob Dole” — is still unanswered.
