Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
A home believed to be connected to the shooter in the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, July 15, 2024, in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
It is hard to know why Thomas Crooks, a nerdy community college student with a 3.8 GPA six weeks away from starting college at Robert Morris University, threw his life away all for a failed attempt to blow off the head of Donald J. Trump.
He was a social outcast, but of a degree that recalls 1980s teen movies. He hadn’t dropped out from school or society. He seemed like a “good sport,” dutifully boasting on camera about his “ten-inch penis” for some classmate’s idea of a prank. He attended one of those anachronistic schools where the guidance counselor knows who sits with whom in the cafeteria and the beloved football coach is also the beloved AP economics teacher and the star of a BlackRock commercial. He met weekly with a community college math nerd book club. Female acquaintances described him as “sweet,” and everyone agreed he was “intelligent.”
He had yet to be identified as a threat by that confluence of the school district, the health care system, and the carceral state that typically—and inevitably, ineffectually—flags the sort of troubled young men who shoot up schools. Which is, of course, the type of troubled young man he now appears in hindsight to probably have been.
What’s noteworthy, then, is the extent to which Crooks has spent his life veritably ensconced in that nexus of the health care system and the carceral state, charged with processing troubled and/or otherwise unwanted souls. His parents are both certified behavioral health counselors, his father for the psychiatric bureaucracy of the Western Pennsylvania health care monopoly UPMC; online reviews suggest it is, like pretty much every provider of mental health care, overburdened and short-staffed. One comment reads, “This place doesn’t care if anybody dies on their hands as long as they get paid.”
(One faction of online conspiracy theorist has used his parents’ vocations to bolster the notion that Crooks was “MK-ULTRA-ed”—i.e., groomed for the assassin’s role via a yearslong campaign of psychotropic medication–addled brainwashing. But however incompetent it has proven in recent weeks, I don’t think a deep state that allegedly put in place such an elaborate scheme over decades would fail quite so spectacularly; it’s far more plausible that Crooks did, unlike the assassins of 1968, act alone.)
Crooks himself worked as a cook for years at the Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, a nursing home formerly owned by the defunct ManorCare chain, which was considered the gold standard of nursing home care before the Carlyle Group took it over, sold off the real estate, pocketed the proceeds to pay its investors a billion-dollar dividend, and left the chain woefully understaffed and unable to care for its patients.
State health inspectors visited the Bethel Park nursing home to investigate formal complaints at least 12 times in the year before Crooks shot Donald Trump, citing the facility for, inter alia, failing to provide the state-mandated minimum of one nurse aide per 20 residents on the night shift on one-third of the nights reviewed in August 2023; causing and then failing to administer basic wound care to treat large, “foul smelling” pressure ulcers that had developed on the ankles, buttocks, and heels of three patients who were unable to move around freely; failing to clean or disinfect the rooms of recently recovered COVID-19 patients in line with their infection control protocols; failing to properly train a nursing assistant who had inadvertently rolled a resident off the bed and caused them to suffer a three-inch forehead laceration; failing to establish proper care plans within 48 hours for patients admitted to the facility with catheters, colostomy bags, and/or supplemental oxygen devices; and in June, failing to establish an adequate care plan for a patient with a broken femur and documented opioid use disorder who had somehow escaped the facility to purchase and overdose on a bag of heroin just outside the facility.
Like most nursing homes, Bethel Park has spent the past few years getting serially dumped onto new owners with fewer and fewer resources. After Carlyle’s maneuvers, ManorCare struggled to pay the ensuing $440 million rent bill, and the chain filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018. But the bankruptcy process failed to lower the rent to sustainable levels; instead, the chain’s new landlord, the real estate investment trust Welltower, facilitated the sale of ManorCare’s operations to an Ohio hospital system that went on to lose hundreds of millions of dollars trying to pay off debts.
The hospital system finally bowed out of the deal in 2022, handing over the reins of about 150 former ManorCare homes including Bethel Park to an outfit called Integra, founded by a 29-year-old entrepreneur with no apparent experience in the nursing home business, but who ultimately turned out to be a straw owner for the more experienced nursing home operator Joel Landau, who currently controls hundreds of nursing homes and is likely the biggest operator in the nursing home business. Landau also recently acquired a prison health care contractor formerly known as Corizon that he is using in part to create what Business Insider has called a “prison-to-nursing home pipeline” that promises to boost occupancy and revenues by placing lower-level criminals recruited through its prison health care contractor in its financially troubled nursing homes.
Just a few years ago, more than 200,000 nursing home residents and staffers died during the COVID-19 pandemic, a big enough statistic that nearly every politician vowed at one point or another to do something about it before summarily abandoning the effort as soon as the media moved on. Joe Biden, to his credit, adopted federal staffing minimums that Trump, who counts the nation’s nursing home magnates as some of his most loyal donors, will almost certainly repeal before they go into effect in May 2026.
Thomas Crooks was just a dietary aide at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing; he didn’t have to dress bedsores or tend personally to patients who hadn’t been bathed in three weeks or had overdosed on the doorstep. But he had to endure the stench of the place, the abiding despair, the intimate knowledge of what ultimately becomes of America’s rejected humans and abandoned promises.
I’m not saying any of that consciously motivated or even affected him in any way; I’m still open to the idea that young Crooks was part of something I don’t yet understand. But in trying to reconcile why a seemingly sweet, bright kid would throw his future away for 15 minutes of infamy, it’s the closest I could get to a theory.
