By: NBC NEWS
Law enforcement authorities have identified the man who made an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.
The FBI said the shooter, who is dead, was identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. A motive was not clear.
The gunman was immediately “neutralized” by the Secret Service, chief of communications Anthony Guglielmi said.
Crooks used a semi-automatic rifle, three senior U.S. law enforcement officials said, based on what was found at the scene.
Bethel Park is a predominantly white, relatively well-to-do city in the southern reaches of greater Pittsburgh. The site of the rally, Butler, is about an hour’s drive north of Pittsburgh.
Pennsylvania voter records listed a Thomas Matthew Crooks with the same address and birth date as a registered Republican, though it was not clear from the records when that was put in place.
At a news conference Saturday night, law enforcement said the investigation was close to making a positive identification of the shooter, who did not have identification on him, state police Lt. Col. George Bivens said.
“The shooter has been tentatively identified,” he said. “It’s a matter of doing biometric confirmations.”
Investigators have also prioritized finding a motive and determining whether the shooter had accomplices, authorities said at the news conference.