(Blaze Media) A cell phone associated with the home and work addresses of would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks visited the Gallery Place building in Washington, D.C., that houses a mall and offices of the FBI, the Heritage Oversight Project reported July 22.
The Oversight Project, part of the Heritage Foundation, began a geo-location investigation hours after the July 13 attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump at a fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Crooks, 20, was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper after opening fire on Trump and the crowd just after 6:11 p.m. ET. Only a perfectly timed turn of his head kept Trump from being killed instantly by a rifle round fired from about 130 yards away, experts said.
The shooting took the life of retired fire chief Corey Comperatore of Sarver, Pennsylvania, and seriously wounded David Dutch of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver of Moon Township, Pennsylvania.
“We began this investigation on the night of the shooting,” an Oversight Project spokesman told Blaze News. “We’ve been working 24/7 since then.”
Oversight Project leaders said they hope other experts in the fields of geo-location searches and criminal investigations will step forward to assist with their probe. The investigation was begun out of concern that the work of the FBI, Secret Service, and other federal law enforcement won’t be transparent or thorough.
Investigators used Crooks’ home and work addresses to find cell phones that were common to both addresses, then triangulated each phone’s paths of travel. They used commercially available phone-identification numbers that are normally used to tailor advertising to the phone’s user.
According to Oversight investigators, a phone associated with Crooks’ work address at a nursing home in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, traveled to the Gallery Place complex in downtown Washington, D.C., on June 26, 2023. The phone “pinged” seven or eight times from that location the same day.
Gallery Place — an 11-story mixed-use building constructed over the Chinatown Metro station — is filled with retail stores and restaurants but also houses offices of the FBI on the upper floors, former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin told Blaze News.
“It is the closest [location] off-site that I’m aware of to the Washington Field Office,” Seraphin said. “Agents are assigned to Washington Field, but they work out of Gallery Place.”
Investigators at the Oversight Project said the phone associated with that ID number most likely belonged to someone who visited Crooks at his place of work. They said they don’t believe it was Crooks’ phone.
Geo-location technology uses a unique ID assigned to each cell phone and searches for common places where the phone and its user travel.
“Every device has an ad ID. It’s kind of like a Social Security number for your cell phone,” said a spokesman for the Oversight Project. “It’s unique and it identifies the phone. You can’t erase it. You can refresh and get a new one, but you only have one ID per phone.”
Investigators said they found at least nine devices associated with Crooks’ home and work addresses in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. They believe at least two of those phones belonged to Crooks himself. A cell phone was found under Crooks’ body after he was killed by a counter-sniper July 13.
Based on geo-location data, investigators found a device associated with Crooks that traveled twice from Bethel Park just south of Pittsburgh to Butler, about 55 miles north of Crooks’ home. Those trips took place on July 4 and July 8, 2024, the Oversight Project reported. That phone ceased all activity on July 12.
The device also stopped at a Home Depot in Butler, they said. A report from U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Crooks purchased a 5.5-foot double ladder at a Home Depot just after 9:30 a.m. on the day of the shooting. Investigators do not believe Crooks used the ladder to access the roof just north of the fairground.
