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New video shows gunman outside Trump rally site before July shooting
Newly surfaced video footage shows Thomas Matthew Crooks walking outside the grounds of the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, less than two hours before he opened fire on July 13.
The four-second clip shows 20-year-old Crooks walking by a row of vendor tents selling Trump merchandise. The footage was captured by Joe Tomko, who owns Iron Clad USA, a merchandise company. Tomko said he has sent the video to the FBI.
CBS News confirmed the footage was captured outside the secure perimeter of the rally. The video’s timestamp indicates it was filmed at 4:26 p.m. — one hour and 45 minutes before Crooks opened fire.
The video places Crooks around half a mile away from the AGR building that he later used as his firing position. A countersniper from a local tactical team photographed Crooks outside the AGR building less than an hour after this video was filmed, at around 5:14 p.m.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said before Congress that the first reported sighting of Crooks by local law enforcement was at approximately 4:26 p.m. Text messages released by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley showed a local countersniper texted his colleagues about a suspicious person close to the AGR building at around 4:26 p.m. However, this footage places Crooks in a different location, around half a mile away from the AGR building, at that time.
It’s unclear if the suspicious person the countersniper saw near the AGR building was in fact Crooks. CBS News has reached out to the FBI and local officials to clarify.
The video also provides insight into Crooks’ movements between when he flew a drone close to the rally site and when he was photographed outside the AGR building after 5 p.m.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before House lawmakers in July that the FBI believed Crooks flew a drone roughly 200 yards away from the stage at around 3:50 p.m. for approximately 11 minutes. “It appears that around 3:50 p.m., 4:00, in that window, on the day of the shooting, that the shooter was flying the drone around the area,” Wray said.
Wray said law enforcement investigators recovered the drone in Crooks’ vehicle, and the bureau believes he was watching video streamed from the device to scout the area.
The local countersniper team reported seeing Crooks walking around the AGR building between 5:10 p.m. and 5:38 p.m., before law enforcement officers lost sight of him again. A little after 6 p.m., as Trump began speaking, Crooks climbed on the roof of the building and opened fire.
Workers removing tree branches near a historic cathedral in Chelm, Poland, unearthed something unexpected when they came upon two children’s skeletons in a shallow burial pit where no gravesites are marked, the government’s Culture Ministry said.
Neither skeleton was buried in a coffin and one of the children was buried with the characteristics of an anti-vampire burial, Dr. Stanisława Gołuba, the archaeologist leading the research, said in a Facebook post. The child’s head was separated from its body, the post said, and the skull was facing down into the ground arranged on a stone. This, plus the way the skeletons were oriented, appears to be consistent with ancient burial methods used to prevent a person thought to be a demonic entity from exiting the grave, Gołuba said.
The skeletons appeared to be from the Early Middle Ages.
The children’s skeletons were removed from their graves, documented and waiting for further analysis, the statement said.
It’s the most recent in a series of findings in Poland of remains buried in ways that suggest people at the time believed they were dealing with vampires or other supernatural entities.
In 2022, Polish researchers found the remains of a woman at a gravesite in the village of Pień with a sickle around her neck and a triangular padlock on her foot. According to ancient beliefs, the padlock was supposed to prevent a deceased person thought to be a vampire from returning from the dead. The sickle was thought to cut the neck if the corpse tried to rise from the grave.
Professor Dariusz Polinski of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun said this type of practice became common throughout Poland in the 17th century in response to a reported vampire epidemic. In addition to practices with a sickle, sometimes corpses were burned, smashed with stones or had their heads and legs cut off.
Six so-called “vampire skeletons” were also found at a cemetery in northwest Poland in 2013. Each was buried with either a sickle laid across their necks or stones placed beneath their jaws said Lesley Gregoricka of the University of South Alabama who led the research team.
contributed to this report.
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