It’s been over a year now since God saved Donald J. Trump from an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania. Why do we know more about the teenage math phenom nicknamed “Big B*lls” from the DOGE team than we do about Thomas Matthew Crooks?
Crooks was able to evade nearly 200 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers to get on a roof with a direct line of sight just 130 yards from President Trump. We still know next to nothing about Crooks, and now we’re learning that the full toxicology results were left off his autopsy report.
There were some toxicology results in the report, but they were incomplete. The autopsy report has been online since September of last year, but only after an independent media outlet sued to get it publicly released. No mainstream media outlet ever bothered to ask for the report.
The initial autopsy report showed that Crooks had elevated levels of lead in his bloodstream. It also showed that he had no “drugs of abuse” in his system at the time of his death. Okay. So, he wasn’t using cocaine or heroin for 48 hours prior to the shooting. But that’s not the full scope of what toxicology screenings can look for.
Nine months after the autopsy report was opened because of a court order, an internet sleuth noticed there was some important data missing from it. Be forewarned: This is going to get a little gross, because we’re talking about body fluids and specific autopsy goop next.
Allegheny County Medical Examiner Ariel Goldschmidt took some specific samples from Crooks’s dead body, but there are no results on toxicology screenings for those samples. Goldschmidt took 8 milliliters of heart blood, 3 milliliters of liver bile, and an envelope of hair from Crooks.
The report has blank spaces where the tox results of those samples should be listed.
The report does contain toxicology results from some separate vials of blood, a urine sample, and some eyeball fluid from Crooks.
Here’s why this is a problem. Law enforcement left Thomas Crooks’s corpse on the hot roof of that building for 12 hours after he was shot. It was 91 degrees in Butler on that afternoon, so the temperature of the roof was likely well over 100 degrees. Tissue and fluid samples degrade much faster in those conditions.
In those conditions, you can only detect the presence of legal and illegal substances in blood, urine, and eyeball fluid for a few hours before they degrade. Liver bile samples, on the other hand, can show the presence of legal or illegal drugs for several weeks after the subject dies. Hair samples can detect the presence of drugs for months.
Not only that, but tox screenings of hair and bile can detect the presence of things like anti-psychotic drugs, Ambien (like Joe Biden is likely addicted to), and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which have been linked to so many school shootings.
The two labs that Goldschmidt sent Crooks’s samples to do not test for the presence of psychiatric medications. They only test for the presence of things like weed and cocaine—and again, proof of using those drugs could have degraded by the time they dragged Crooks off of that hot roof.
A full and thorough toxicology screening of Crooks’s hair and bile could have revealed long-term drug use or the use of drugs for a mental health condition. Instead, there are blank spaces for those samples on the autopsy report.
The moment that Goldschmidt completed the autopsy, he turned over Crooks’s body to Beinhauer-Connell Funeral Home. Crooks was cremated just days after he died. Goldschmidt had neglected to take the bullet fragments out of Crooks’s shoulder before he was disposed of.
Was this sloppiness or laziness on the part of the medical examiner to overlook toxicology screenings on those samples? Or were the samples actually tested, and they don’t want the public to know what those tests revealed?
And why was Crooks sent to Allegheny County for the autopsy when he died in Butler County? Once again, we’re left to speculate about what it all means because the public is being kept in the dark.
Goldschmidt and his underling Katrina Lindauer, who signed off on the final autopsy report, are refusing to answer questions about those blank spaces. Butler County Coroner Bill Young, who decided to send Crooks to Allegheny County for the autopsy, is also not responding to requests for comment.