Mysteries Followed After Police Seized the Body of the Person Who Shot Donald Trump

The world will never forget the image: President Donald Trump, then a former President and Presidential hopeful, was speaking at a rally in Butler, Penn., when the unthinkable happened.

Trump was targeted by a shooter, turning the high-energy rally into a nightmare in moments, and taking a life — although not the life he was intending to take in his planned political assassination.

After the shooting, the suspect was found, and his body became the center of a mystery that had agencies pointing fingers at one another and one frustrated representative hunting for answers. Here's what we know about what happened to the man who shot at Trump.

The timeline of the assassination attempt against Trump was fairly straightforward. AP News reports that between 5 and 6 p.m. on July 13, 2025, security noted a man pacing on the outskirts of the rally venue and snapped a photo of him after noting he had a backpack and a range finder. They lost track of him for a while, but spotted him again about 20 minutes prior to the shooting. That man: Thomas Matthew Crooks.

At 6:02 p.m., Trump took the stage.

A few minutes later, people noted someone climbing onto a roof opposite the stage, and shouted to draw attention to the man. At 6:11 p.m., Trump turned to the side on stage to point to something he was speaking about, and three shots rang out, one wounding an observer, one fatally striking firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was seated behind the stage, and one grazing Trump's ear. Trump fingered his ear in surprise before Secret Service covered him.

Approximately one minute later, Secret Service confirmed that the shooter was down.

According to USA Today, an autopsy would later reveal that Crooks died of a single gunshot wound from a counter-sniper team. However, the state of his body and what would happen next sparked a mystery that remains to this day.

In the wake of his attempted assassination of Trump and his death at the hands of security, Crooks' body was taken by police.

However, when US Representative Clay Higgins traveled to Butler to investigate the shooting, Crooks' body was "missing." In a report detailing his frustration, Higgins explained, "My effort to examine Crooks' body on Monday, August 5, caused quite a stir and revealed a disturbing fact … the FBI released the body for cremation 10 days after J13. On J23, Crooks was gone. Nobody knew this until Monday, August 5, including the County Coroner, law enforcement, Sheriff, etc." (excerpt via Newsweek).

According to Higgins, the Butler County coroner "technically had legal authority over the body, but I spoke with the Coroner, and he would have never released Crooks' body to the family for cremation or burial without specific permission from the FBI." He added, "Similar to releasing the crime scene and scrubbing crime scene biological evidence … this action by the FBI can only be described by any reasonable man as an obstruction to any following investigative effort."

So, what happened to Crooks' body, and why did it go missing? We still don't know. Higgins remarked, "The problem with me not being able to examine the actual body is that I won't know 100 percent if the coroner's report and the autopsy report are accurate. We will actually never know. Yes, we'll get the reports and pictures, etc, but I will not ever be able to say with certainty that those reports and pictures are accurate according to my own examination of the body."

The mystery remains.