Puzzling Similarities Between Cole Allen And Thomas Crooks

I'm intrigued about what's coming out on the "Hinckley Hilton" shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, and the Butler, PA shoter, Thomas Crooks. Both seem to have been quiet and unassuming, both were good students, but their families had been worried about them and their apparent relationship with firearms. Nevertheless, that both would wind up attempted presidential assassins came as a surprise to friends and employers. Regarding Crooks, according to Wikipedia,

One investigation only found a "lunch detention in middle school for chewing gum" as bad behavior growing up. He joined the National Technical Honor Society in 2021 while a junior in high school. In 2022, he graduated Bethel Park High School with high honors and won a $500 "star award" from the National Math and Science Initiative. Crooks earned a score of 1530 out of 1600 on the SAT, as well as perfect grades on three Advanced Placement exams. Classmates and school officials characterized him as being quiet{.}

. . . During his freshman year of high school, Crooks anonymously posted threats online, warning students at Bethel Park High School to not come to school the next day. Here, Crooks had claimed to have placed bombs inside the bathrooms in the school's cafeteria. Many students stayed home the following day. The threats were dismissed by the school's administration, and no legal actions were taken.

. . . He was employed as a dietary aide in a nursing home at the time of the shooting. According to the nursing home, which is less than a mile away from where he lived, he had passed a background check and "performed his job without concern". He had been accepted into both the University of Pittsburgh and Robert Morris University in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh, and planned to attend the latter. He had been a member of a local shooting club for at least a year.

. . . Crooks' father noticed his mental health declining in the year before the shooting, and particularly in the months after graduation. He later told investigators that he had seen his son talking to himself and dancing around his bedroom late at night, and that his family had a history of mental health and addiction issues. Crooks was also making depression-related queries online, investigators found. Interviews with his teachers, friends, and co-workers suggest that many people who interacted with him regularly did not know he was troubled.

Allen's background is pretty similar; he was also quiet and a good student who seemed promising:

Allen's academic record is striking. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology — Caltech — in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Caltech confirmed his graduation to multiple news outlets. He went on to earn a master's degree in computer science at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. According to a Caltech graduation announcement still online from 2017, he was active in a Christian student fellowship and a campus club for Nerf gun enthusiasts during his undergraduate years. In the summer of 2014, his online resume says, he completed a competitive summer research fellowship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

. . . For the last six years, Allen had worked at C2 Education, a Torrance-based test prep and college counseling company. In December 2024, the company's Facebook page named him Teacher of the Month. According to the Los Angeles Times, Allen tutored several high school students who were members of the Asian American Civic Trust, a Torrance-based nonprofit. Its president, Dylan Wakayama, told the Times the students "thought he was very intelligent, proficient in biology, mathematics and science. They thought he was on the nicer, quiet side."

According to WBALTV,

Bin Tang, a computer science professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, told The Associated Press that Allen took a few of his classes before graduating.

“He was a very good student indeed, always sitting in the first row of my class, paying attention, and frequently emailing me with coursework questions. Soft spoken, very polite, a good fellow. I am very shocked to see the news,” Tang wrote in an email.

But at the same link,

Secret Service and Montgomery County Police interviewed Allen's sister at their residence in Rockville, Maryland. She said that her brother had a tendency to make radical statements and his rhetoric constantly referenced a plan to do “something” to fix the issues with today’s world.

She also confirmed Allen purchased two handguns and a shotgun from Cap Tactical Firearms and kept them stored at their parent’s home, and that their parents were unaware that Allen was keeping the firearms in the home. He would regularly go to the shooting range to train with his firearms.

His brother also doesn't appear to have been surprised to receive a copy of his manifesto just before the shooting:

He had written about targeting Trump administration officials, and his family raised concerns with law enforcement before the event, President Donald Trump said Sunday in an interview on Fox News Channel.

. . . White House officials told our Washington Bureau and Investigative Unit that Allen's brother had notified the New London Police Department in Connecticut of Allen's alleged manifesto, which he had sent to his family members minutes prior to the incident.

Another similarity between Crooks and Allen is that despite their high academic performance, they worked in low-level jobs unrelated to their career aspirations, Crooks as a dietary aide in a nursing home, Allen as a part-time tutor at a tutoring and test cramming company. Both lived with their parents.

The knee-jerk reaction to Cole Allen so far on the right has been to blame the education system, while on the left, it's to blame guns. I think both miss the point; I get the impression that Crooks and Allen concentrated in technical fields, where they both did well, and not in fields where they might have been exposed to leftist propaganda. The guns, of course, are a symptom, not a cause.

I'm inclined to note that in males, the typical age for the onset of schizophrenia is between late teens and early 30s, and the circumstances we're learning about Allen and Crooks seem to be pointing in that direction. The most productive thing we can do is get the quackery out of the mental health profession and get much more serious about studying subjects like schizophrenia.