Ten days. That's how long it took for the body of Thomas Matthew Crooks — the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania — to be released back to his family, cremated, and reduced to ashes. An anonymous donor paid for the cremation. The family, according to federal investigative records, couldn't afford the funeral costs.
Two years later, we still don't know who wrote that check.
The detail surfaced in a federal investigative summary reported by Not the Bee, and it sits in the middle of a pile of new information about Crooks that keeps getting stranger the longer you look at it. His father, Matthew Crooks, was listed as unemployed at the time of the shooting — described elsewhere in federal records as "retired." His mother was on work leave. A rural Pennsylvania family with no apparent means to handle the aftermath, and an unnamed benefactor steps in to make sure the body is destroyed as quickly as possible.
Cremate, not bury. There's a difference. One preserves evidence. The other doesn't.
The emerging details about Crooks himself don't make the picture any cleaner. His internet search history included the JFK assassination, school shootings, and depression. He purchased an AR-15 and bomb-making materials. In 2021, he made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project — a left-wing voter mobilization group. His written notes referenced George Orwell's commentary on "imperialistic policies" and included a citation of Mao Zedong's line about "true political power."
A 20-year-old quoting Mao, buying bomb components, researching assassinations and mass shootings, and donating to progressive political organizations. That's not a profile that screams "lone wolf with no ideological motive," which is precisely how the early narrative framed him.
Rep. Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, pushed for answers on the cremation timeline and the anonymous payment. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa has been pulling at these threads since the beginning. The FBI, under deputy director Paul Abbate, produced investigative summaries that contain these details but somehow never resulted in a press conference explaining them.
The anonymous donor question is the one that won't go away, because it doesn't have an innocent explanation that makes sense. Cremation isn't the default when a 20-year-old dies. It's not what a family with no resources arranges within ten days of a national crisis. Someone made a decision to ensure that the physical remains of the man who shot at a sitting president would be permanently unavailable for future examination — and paid for the privilege of doing so anonymously.
Every assassination attempt in American history generates decades of investigation, reexamination, and public scrutiny. The Warren Commission published 26 volumes. The House Select Committee on Assassinations reopened the JFK case 15 years later. Physical evidence — bodies, bullets, trajectories — is the foundation of every one of those inquiries.
The body is gone. The donor is unnamed. The search history points in directions nobody in an official capacity seems eager to follow. Two years of new details, and the file still reads like the first draft of something that was never meant to be finished.