The Broken Life of Matthew Thomas Crooks

Matthew Thomas Crooks, age 20, who attempted to assassinate former president Trump on July 13, resembled–with his shy, mischievous grin, pale skin, braces, and acne–countless young males who have sat in front of me in English classrooms over years–at community colleges, in high schools, and even in middle schools, as Crooks looked very young in his photo, now published all over national and international media. When schools shut down in March 2020, and lockdowns ensued, Crooks was 16, in the spring of his sophomore year of high school. 

Absent from public discussions of Crooks’ tragedy are despair, losses, and mental health crises Covid-era lockdowns caused, especially young people; cruel, vitriolic, and even violent political rhetoric pervading our culture in the last several years; and effects of video gaming on young people’s brains, and perhaps on Crooks’ brain, effects worsened by the predatory gaming and technology industry, making billions of dollars, especially on young males. Gaming addictions and other addictions skyrocketed during Covid lockdowns.  

Reports describe Crooks as a computer gamer, and shy student, whom acquaintances have said was bullied and often sat alone at lunch. How might the last four years of cultural collapse and health harms of lockdowns have exacerbated this young man’s challenges? Across U.S. airwaves, commenters on Crooks are silent on covid era devastation to the lives of young people.  An epidemic of mental health crises struck those ages 18 to 25, according to the CDC and other sources, with more than 25 percent in this age group saying they seriously considered suicide. Mental health crises persist. Chronic absenteeism persists today with some public schools losing their accreditation due to poor attendance.

During lockdowns, students endured months of computer school and social isolation. Days before he climbed on a rooftop near a Pennsylvania farm show complex, aimed and shot at former president Trump’s head, someone claiming to be Crooks bragged about a planned assassination on Steam, a site frequented by tens of millions of gamers, who use it to buy computer games and discuss gaming. After the shooting, the name on the account was changed. Who posted the message? We don’t know the extent of Crooks’ computer gaming and the kinds of games he played, but this certainly may be worth examining since someone announced his deadly plan on a major gaming site and, sadly, called it his “premiere.”

“July 13 will be my premiere, watch as it unfolds,” someone using his name wrote on the site. Crooks had asked for the upcoming Saturday off from his job in a nursing home kitchen. His actions were planned. He lost his life that day, shot in the head by a Secret Service sniper. He killed a firefighter, Corey Comperatore, and injured others.

News stories report that Crooks had just completed a two-year community college degree and was headed to a four-year university. In high school, he won a math and science award. In school reopening plans in the Covid period, bureaucrats ordered students to mask their faces, to sit six feet apart to eat lunch, and, at many schools, disallowed them from eating with friends. High school students could only remove masks long enough to chew their food. Organized sports, clubs, and groups ceased meeting for two years in many places. These bizarre practices depressed even the heartiest students. What effect did they have on Crooks?

Instead of hard discussions of what actually may have led to Crooks’ violence and suicidal actions, we read obfuscations, evasions, and vagaries. With verbose, dehumanizing language, John Cohen, “Former Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis and Counterterrorism Coordinator and ABC News contributor,” completely evades harms governments perpetrated in the last few years as well as the increasingly, vitriolic political language dominating U.S. airwaves, language inundating young people as they struggle with what all young people do–finding communities, developing life purposes, and making meanings.

“The individuals who exhibit the behavioral characteristics this shooter is exhibiting go into the attack not expecting to survive,” Cohen says. “Some behavioral characteristics that have come to light already is that this is an individual who clearly suffered challenges in developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships,” said Cohen, who probably never missed a paycheck during the Covid period and aftermath when government and health bureaucrats decimated small businesses and cultural centers while millions lost jobs and opportunities. How much does ABC “news” pay for this language that would make George Orwell cringe? Another ABC story states, “Investigators are also looking into what appeared to be disinformation that the suspect was consuming before the attack and whether it played any role in it, according to law enforcement sources.”

In plain language: A young man shot people. He was someone’s son, someone’s student, someone’s employee. He was on his way to college. Unasked questions remain about Crooks. Some young people may have endured a learned helplessness in the Covid period when month after month, isolation, fear, restrictive policies, and bizarre practices did not abate. But in video games, especially the violent ones with shooting and killing, gamers become part of a community, maybe a combat team. The player may become a killer, an assassin, a hero. And he doesn’t die in the game. But these are fake worlds. How many hours of video games did Crooks play? What kinds? Shutdowns and lockdowns forced young people inside, and for some, increased gaming hours relieved pain, stress, boredom, and purposelessness. 

Gaming addiction worsened during pandemic shutdowns with game usage nearly doubling from 2019 to 2022 in males, 15 -24, according to an August 13, 2023 report in The New York Post. Mental health harms from computer gaming have not received nearly enough attention, especially during the Covid era. In 2018, the World Health Organization officially voted to adopt the latest edition of its International Classification of Diseases, or ICD, to include an entry on “gaming disorder” as a behavioral addiction.

People playing online combat games may have observable changes in speech patterns, behavior, and impulse control. Immersed in the game, they often claim they can’t leave the game. While playing combat video games, players’ clipped, rapid-fire speech patterns resemble those in the Collateral Murder video Julian Assange released on Wikileaks, for which the U.S. government sentenced Assange to prison. In 2007, U.S. soldiers in an Apache helicopter killed several Iraqi people, including two Reuters journalists. Former U.S. soldier, Ethan McCord, who arrived after the attack and saved two children, has said that such occurrences during the U.S.-led war in Iraq were common.

We do not know the content of the games Crooks played but may get glimpses of horrible, realistic violence contained in some of the most popular ones. Teachers attend required computerized active shooter trainings, and these trainings look and feel disturbingly like video games. Excessive gaming alters young people’s brains, and makers design them to be highly addictive. Harms have been so pervasive that support networks and treatment centers increased, including groups for family and friends of addicted loved ones.

Parents, trying to help addicted gamers, describe hiding routers and cables from teens or young adults, who compulsively try to regain internet access. Parents describe working at the library themselves after having to cancel the house internet when an addicted teen became aggressive. Internet and gaming recovery sites and programs proliferate with more studies on games’ powerful psychological manipulations, or dark patterns, in the technology and how to avoid them.

Parents report teens breaking into car trunks or tearing apart closets after attempts to limit gaming by removing computer devices or turning off the internet. A colleague, who specializes in addiction, tells of a parent, trying to help an addicted gamer, who wore an adult diaper, so he didn’t have to leave the game. Aren’t parents supposed to limit harmful substances or activities for their children’s health and safety? Spouses and parents on support networks describe addicts not eating or sleeping, gaming for hours and days, and becoming assaultive with attempts to control gaming. What support is there for parents, for Thomas Crooks’ parents, described as both licensed counselors, who were so worried about their son that July day that they called the police to find him and check on him? Why were they calling the police? 

Described as bullied and socially isolated, what do we know about Crooks’ gaming habits? People argue that games don’t cause teens or young adults to become violent, but research has shown that games may numb them to violence and cause aggressive behavior. While denial persists, anecdotal data surges among parents, educators, and mental health professionals. Gaming is a multi-billion-dollar industry with revenues exceeding those of the movie and music industries combined. Those profiting from gaming certainly would aggressively control the kinds of questions asked, studies conducted, and information published.

Young people use cell phones to buy, play, and discuss gaming. Many U.S. governors have called for cell phone bans in public schools after Jonathan Haidt published his 2024 book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The book discusses research on emotional, social, and mental health damage cell phone and technology abuse causes young people. Why did Crooks have two cell phones? Who was paying for them? Media reports say that Crooks was “rarely seen in his neighborhood”. Why?

Years ago, I attended at my children’s school district a presentation on cell phone and computer device abuse and harm to young people. It was organized by the superintendent. Sadly, I noticed parents all around me, scrolling their phones in the dark during the presentation. Also, years ago, I was horrified to learn that teens slept with cell phones. What have these devices done to them? Do I want my beloved child or student sleeping with the internet and all its sordidness, predators, and garbage in a device under her pillow? Yes, there is good on the Internet but also so much that is harmful, and our children must be protected.

The media negatively portrayed Crooks’ gun club membership. He practiced target shooting with his father’s gun. I didn’t grow up with guns in the house and have no familiarity with them. However, I imagine that if someone like my brother-in-law, who belongs to a gun club in rural Illinois, had any inkling of this young man’s foolish and desperate behavior, he would have asked Crooks what in the world he was going to do; he would have told him to act like he had some sense. Gun club members, who know how to use guns safely, may have been glad to take Crooks out hunting or fishing.

Had they known his growing terrible trouble, they may’ve taught him how to build and repair houses or barns, how to grow food, to raise and process animals for food, how to ward off despair with real-world communities, productive activity, and serving others. Some members of the farm show complex audience may have provided Crooks with good counsel, perhaps guiding him to stay connected to the natural world’s wonders–had they had the chance to steer him from his deadly path.

Some speculated that Crooks was part of a conspiracy. I don’t believe it was “them” or a “they” who did the shooting. It wasn’t the gun that did it. Tragically, the shooter was a distraught young man, roiling in a terrible cultural storm, one that still engulfs teens and young people. What will we do, as the generation with more years of context, that should hold more wisdom, strength, and hope to pass on?

Crooks didn’t care for his own or anyone else’s life or safety that day. Searches of his computer revealed no ideology on his laptop, investigators have said. None of Crooks’ acquaintances interviewed said he discussed politics. Did Crooks imagine he was “defending democracy” if he succeeded in killing Trump? That potent abstraction that tens of thousands of mostly young men are sent to kill for in U.S. foreign wars, many of which are revealed to be based on lies, folly, and profits? How did lockdowns, bullying, and despair contribute to Crooks’ tragedy? Was he in a game? The last several years of increasingly cruel, vicious political rhetoric provided another potent context for Crooks’ suicidal violence. 

“It’s time to put a bull’s eye on Trump,” President Joe Biden said days before Crooks’ assassination attempt. Sadly, I saw an acquaintance on social media post a comment after the shooting that he wished the shooter’s aim was better. 

Like so many young males’ shootings, Crooks’ actions included his planned suicide.  Our time to help him, to notice, to perhaps prevent this violence was months, perhaps years ago.