Who is Maxwell Yearick?

And Why Do We Still Know So Little About the Butler Shooting?

While most of the country is busy forgetting about a young kid from Pennsylvania named Thomas Matthew Crooks, we should be thinking about another guy named Maxwell Yearick.

Have you ever heard of Maxwell Yearick?

If you haven’t, it’s because the powers that be don’t want you to know. Born on December 3, 1986, in Pennsylvania, Maxwell Yearick has been a rabid leftist for years. At times in his life, he lived in or near Butler, Pennsylvania. While there is no evidence he knew Crooks, there is no evidence they didn’t know each other. The population of Butler is only about 13,500 people and Yearick even went to the same gun club as Crooks did. The question is whether Yearick was involved in the Butler assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and, if so, how?

Reuters has debunked the claim almost the moment it was articulated, which tells me there is something there.

Maxwell Yearick

In 2016, Mawell Yearick got arrested and went to prison after an altercation at a Trump rally in Pittsburgh in 2016. It is alleged that Yearick, wearing a black mask and black hat, grabbed the vest of a police sergeant and tried to fight him. A female officer intervened, but Yearick resisted and both fell to the ground; the officer’s hand and shoulder were injured in the scuffle. Charged with assault and resisting arrest, Yearick was facing a possible 12-month sentence. In the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County, Yearick pleaded guilty to Judge Anthony M. Mariani and accepted a three-month sentence in a non-jury trial.

Maxwell Yearick was ahead of the curve, he was already a violent lefty loon in 2016. About a thousand protesters showed up to the Trump rally that day back in 2016, but only a handful got arrested. Mawell Yearick had made his bones as a rabid anti-Trump guy before Trump ever stepped foot in the White House.

As for the rest of his resume, there are some common themes.

• Maxwell Yearick was allegedly involved in violent Antifa activities in Seattle

• Yearick’s family current resides in Arizona, where his parents own Yearick Armory, LLC. It’s licensed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. It’s business type is described as “manufacturer of firearms other than destructive devices.” They make explosives.

• Yearick lived at times in the same Butler area as Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man the government says shot Trump. Both Yearick and Crooks trained there at the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club

• Yearick allegedly went to Ukraine to fight in the war some time in 2023 and he returned in April 2024

• It is alleged that the CIA noticed Maxwell Yearick and recruited him because of his work in Ukraine. His first CIA mission (alleged) was helping to train the Kurdish fighters in Syria to wage war against ISIS

So Maxwell Yearick was more than just some fired-up Antifa kid or some crackpot protestor at a Trump rally. This guy served in the military in Ukraine, had alleged ties to the CIA, and had access to explosives and likely extensive knowledge of how to build them.

Ask ChatGPT or other artificial intelligence about Maxwell Yearick and you’ll find that the claims he was involved in any way in the Butler shooting are “false.” Overconfidence is always their tell.

July 13, 2024

It cannot be confirmed that Maxwell Yearick was at the Butler rally on July 13, 2024. There are some grisly photos of the deceased shooter on X that do favor Yearick, but others dispute it. Identification is made difficult by the fact that the shooter was shot in the face.

Shots were fired at the Butler rally on July 13, 2024. Corey Comperatore was killed, David Dutch and James Copenhaver were shot and badly injured (but survived), and Donald Trump turned his head at precisely the right second so that the bullet aimed at his brain inflicted only superficial damage.

Who was the shooter at the Butler rally? We have been told that Thomas Matthew Crooks was the shooter and he was, in turn, shot by a sniper. The corpse of Thomas Matthew Crooks was left overnight on the roof where he was shot and then removed for autopsy. I’m no forensic scientist but this does not sound like a solid chain of custody for the corpse of a would-be presidential assassin. Not only that, there is no record attesting how the medical people who did the autopsy confirmed the body was that of Crooks.

There were some who said that more than one shooter was involved. Get out your tinfoil hat. One theory is that Yearick was the guy on the roof while Crooks was on the water tower or elsewhere and both shot. Another theory is that Yearick was the guy on the roof who got killed and Crooks, a helper, was allowed to disappear. But it two shooters were involved, what happened to them? One guy was killed, but what happened to the other one? And if Yearick wasn’t involved, why don’t we know where he was that day—or any day since? Yearick has disappeared off the map after the Butler shooting.

However, if there is one story that no one in the media wants to touch, it’s the Butler shooting.

So Who Fired at Trump that Day?

Officially, one man was shot that day, and he was identified as being the lone shooter and named Thomas Matthew Crooks.

The autopsy purports to be that of Crooks, but there is no scientific statement in the autopsy report as to how the identity was verified. Fingerprints were not taken; there is no DNA sample from the corpse. The body was left on the roof in the Butler fairgrounds overnight and then brought in the next morning for an autopsy. The autopsy found that flies had already begun laying eggs on the body.

Dr. Ariel Goldschmidt, who conducted the autopsy, released the autopsy report on July 22, 2024. He said the “chain of custody” of the body began when the body was brought to him for autopsy. However, the chain of custody should have started when the man was shot. The body should have been secured and removed for autopsy rather than left overnight. And Goldschmidt should have taken fingerprints or provided other identifying characteristics. For instance, were there tattoos? (Yearick had tattoos but Crooks did not.) Were the ears pierced? (Yearick wore those big flat discs in his ears called gauges, but Crooks had no ear piercings.) Not noted in the report.

To be diligent, it must be stated that there is no official confirmation that Maxwell Yearick was even in Butler that day. But here are some reasons his presence was suspected and why internet denizens almost immediately started throwing around the name Maxwell Yearick when it was reported that Trump had been shot.

• Yearick was an Antifa activist and rabidly anti-Trump. He was already incarcerated for violence at a Trump rally in 2016. That was back before people really got agitated about Trump

• Yearick’s family was living in Arizona in July of 2024 and they said Maxwell was not in Arizona at the time and they did not know (or care to say) where he was

• There was a white GMC van (sometimes called a truck and sometimes called “the white van” in various reports) with Arizona plates at the rally

• Yearick’s family owns an explosives company in Mesa, Arizona, giving Mawell access to bomb-making paraphernalia and likely explosive know-how

• Yearick disappeared off the face of the earth on July 14, 2024. He’s not just physically gone, there are no traces of him online or by phone. No points of contact. If he’s not dead, he disappeared with CIA-level precision

• Yearick was familiar with the Butler region

Yearick was 38 years old, Crooks was not much over 20. However, in photo comparisons to show that Yearick and Crooks would not easily be mistaken for the other, most of the photos compared a high-school-age Crooks (with a smooth baby-face) to a middle-aged Yearick. In actual fact, Yearick looked younger than his 38 years and once you shoot somebody in the face, the age differential matters less.

Alas, Poor Yearick!

Why do people think Yearick was even involved in the Trump shooting? For starters, Maxwell Yearick was a known anti-Trump agitator, prone to violence, with ties to Butler. Yearick had been living in Arizona with his folks at the time but disappeared around the time of the shooting. I suspect Yearick was on some kind of a watch list at the time, and the watch list flagged officials that Maxwell Yearick was on the move.

Yearick did not eschew violence. He went to Ukraine of his own volition, and he later stayed to train Kurdish soldiers to fight ISIS. Yearick had the military chops that Crooks lacked. While Crooks was building improvised explosives at home before the rally, Yearick’s family owned an explosives business.

The theories that are emerging are eerily reminiscent of the Kennedy assassination. It’s like they only have one assassination cover story in the official overlord playbook. The government and mainstream media are trying to promote a lone assassin explanation—the “lone nut” theory. The idea is we’ll never understand what the assassin’s motive was because he was likely insane. And no one else was involved, so there is no reason to investigate further.

The media pictures painted of Oswald and Crooks are eerily similar. Like the official version of Lee Harvey Oswald, Thomas Matthew Crooks was a young man of indeterminate political beliefs who committed an outrageous crime for no particularly discernible reason. And like Oswald, Crooks is being presented in the media as a strange man with no friends, who undertook this brazen attack on a prominent politician for no apparent reason other than he was confused. Oh, and in the official stories neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor Thomas Matthew Crooks are described as intelligent.

But what if the shooter in Butler was actually Yearick and Crooks was the patsy? The politically active and (allegedly) CIA-connected Yearick could be rushed from the crime scene and hidden while the young boy Crooks took the fall. It would make for a better “lone nut story” if there was just one assassin with no obvious political motives.

If Yearick was the shooter or even if he was just there that day, well, that might drag intelligence organizations into the Butler event. It might be unsettling. It’s bad enough the Secret Service all but assured us it was an “inside job,” Yearick would be just one more nail in the coffin of the official narrative.

But what if it wasn’t one or the other—what if there were two shooters? Could one of the duo be Maxwell Yearick? It is widely believed today that Kennedy was killed by a team of multiple assassins. Could the same thing have happened in Butler that day? Were they both patsies? If two shooters were involved, what happened to the other one? And which one was autopsied?

Bear in mind, this is total speculation but when you live in a world of lies, speculation is your first tool. In the commotion after the Butler shooting, some online sources named an Antifa guy called Mark Violets as a potential second shooter. That theory has been less debunked than merely discarded. I point this out only to underscore that right from the start, the idea of Thomas Michael Crooks working alone seemed preposterous. The guy couldn’t even get a good job, yet he is going to pull of a major murder in a public setting? Seems unlikely.

Conspiracy theories flourish when the story we are told doesn’t make sense.

More than a year later, we don’t know for sure whose autopsy Dr. Goldschmidt performed. We don’t know Crooks’ motive or if Crooks was even the shooter. And even if he was never in Butler at all, Cwhatever happened to Antifa gadfly Maxwell Yearick?

The Congressional Report

Congress has issued a report, which is the closest they get to taking any action. Congressional reports always sound solemn and dignified, but remember, these are the same guys who tried to sell us the Warren Report. These are the people who told us January 6 was an insurrection and Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

According to this report on the Butler shooting, eight shots were fired that day. Secret Service failed spectacularly in preventing the shooting despite more red flags than a Chinese parade.

Fortunately but allegedly, Crooks was shot by a member of the SS Counter Sniper Team but the sniper’s name has never released. The report says all eight shots came from Crooks’ weapon, but that’s a lot of lead in a short period of time. Perhaps there was another shooter? But where was he?

The autopsy report, only recently obtained by Judicial Watch, said Crooks died of a gunshot wound to the head. The bullet entered via his left upper lip and exited the side of his neck. There were injuries to his teeth, skull, tongue, brains, and more. He had scratches on his face, both knees, and both elbows. He had impressions on both forearms made from Zip ties. (This is puzzling to me. Did they Zip tie him after he was shot?)

A toxicology screen found no evidence of alcohol or drugs of abuse but a slightly elevated level of lead in the blood (5.9 mcg/dl). The autopsy was performed by Ariel Goldschmidt, MD, and the autopsy room tech was Bernadette Buchholz. Rachel Ecoff was the official photographer. The FBI was present (Jill Wolfe, Brian Johnson) and the police too (PA state troopers Jennifer Cantella, Michael Pickard, Michael Gram). While the autopsy was pretty straightforward, the procedures were a mess.

There were no steps taken to secure the chain of custody of the body—the body was brought to Goldschmidt on the morning of July 14, 2024 after having stayed out all night on the roof. Goldschmidt did not record any steps he took to ascertain that the body was that of Thomas Matthew Crooks.

Dr. Goldschmidt, chief medical examiner of Allegheny Co., was summoned to Washington, D.C. in order to testify before Congress. He autopsied both Thomas Matthew Crooks and Corey Comperatore, both of whom were shot that day. He stated that his office was not involved in transport of bodies. Chain of custody paperwork only started when the body got to Goldschmidt. This seems awfully sloppy and haphazard considering that this was a shot fired at the head of a man running for president.

Goldschmidt found one bullet in the body of the assassin. It was a through-and-through shot in the head but reentered the body in the back. Both the Secret Service and the Butler Co. Emergency Services fired at shooter on the roof.

Crooks’ body was released to the family and cremated. Even the coroner, whose job it would be to officially release the body back to the family, did not know that Crooks was cremated until after the fact. Since the body has been cremated, there is no longer any way to identify it in any scientific way as belonging to Thomas Matthew Crooks. This may have been the autopsy of Maxwell Yearick. Nor can any other physician verify that Dr. Goldschmidt’s autopsy determinations were correct.

The Mystery

But let’s not go too far too soon. All we know so far is that things are starting to look hinky.

We don’t know for sure that Maxwell Yearick was even in Butler that day, let alone if he was involved in the Trump shooting. But there has been persistent speculation as to whether or not Crooks was a “lone nut” or if he was working with somebody. And if there was another person involved, there is some early rumblings that it was Maxwell Yearick.

• Yearick is known to have worked training fighters, perhaps Crooks was a young protegee? At any rate, he was experienced in training young men in war

• It is known that around the time of the Butler shooting, Crooks was creating improvised explosives at his home. Was this a skill he might have learned from Yearick? Yearick’s family were in the explosives business

• Was the white van with Arizona tags Yearick’s vehicle? Early reports claim it belonged to Crooks, but why would Crooks have an out-of-state vehicle?

• Were the explosives brought to the Butler rally brought by Crooks or Yearick? These explosives were never used, indicating whatever was planned to happen did not come off as planned

• Where was Yearick in July of 2024? His family said he had left Arizona but they don’t know where he went

• Why has Yearick not been heard of in over a year, having “disappeared” off the grid on July 14, 2024?

The Men, The Myths, The Legends

Lee Harvey Oswald got a character make-over by the Warren Commission. Oswald was a young man (just a bit older than Crooks) when he was killed shortly after being accused of murdering President Kennedy. Portrayed by the media as being slow-witted, inarticulate, and a first-rate dullard, the real Lee Harvey Oswald was actually quite smart. He studied and mastered the Russian language in order to do a stint in Russia (either on his own as a defector, or as part of a U.S. intelligence mission, depending on who you believe). Oswald never became a speaker of flawless Russian, but he learned functional Russian quickly. He was well read and avidly followed politics. He was working with the intelligence community (not the CIA, the Office of Naval Intelligence; we have over a dozen intelligence agencies in this country). The Warren Commission painted him as an unaccomplished young man with a low IQ, no clear political views, a dismal moral compass, and whose lack of ability and integrity forced him to subsist at the near-poverty level. Oh, and Oswald beat his wife. (There is a theory about that as well. Marina Oswald, now Marina Porter was likely Soviet intelligence and the playbook for honeypot spies like her was to marry an American, get embedded in the American culture, and then divorce the husband so as to be able to move freely through American society. The main method for getting a divorce was provoking fights and getting the husband charged on domestic violence. So even the notion that Oswald was a deranged wife-beater may have another side to it.)

The myth of Thomas Matthew Crooks is similar. In reality, he was a bright guy, a diligent student, somewhat shy but excellent at math and engineering-type skills. He seems to have been a bit of a nerd but he was well liked and thought to have a good future ahead of him. Yet Crooks is portrayed as a poor student, a guy with no ambition, and a man who was forced to work in a nursing home cafeteria because that was the best job he could get. Oh, and he had no girlfriend.

In truth, Crooks had always been a diligent student. In the last year of his life, he became increasingly distracted and less focused. He started using an encrypted email service called Mailfence and a virtual private network called Mullvad. This has been reported by mainstream media (CBS News) and one wonders why a guy living in a small town in Pennsylvania and working in the kitchen of a local nursing home required such intense security. If Crooks had no friends and no girlfriend, why did he need spy-level security for his electronics?

CBS News further reports that Crooks in these last months of his life searched for information about guns, ammo, privacy, and explosives. In December 2023 there was an odd email from Crooks to a business complaining that the explosive fuel he had ordered had not been delivered yet.

These were odd things for a rule-abiding young engineering nerd to be involved in. They also don’t fit in with the myth of a stupid guy with no ambitions. So we are being presented with an image of Thomas Matthew Crooks that is off-center. Was he really stupid and without direction? If he was so distracted and feckless, why did he have secure communication tools?

On a lighter note, Crooks also liked gaming and followed the Pittsburgh Steelers. On a darker note, he had previously searched for information on major depressive disorder, which might indicate his mental health was failing. Part of being a “lone nut” means you have to be not just alone, you have to be a nut.

In June of 2024, Crooks, like the rest of us, was getting more and more interested in the presidential campaign. He searched often to find out when and where the Democrat National Convention (DNC) and the Republican National Convention (RNC) were going to be held. When he learned about Trump’s upcoming rally in Butler, Crooks searched for the Butler location. He didn’t just plan to attend, he was scoping out the site. That was on July 7, 2024, less than a week before the shooting.

Reuters did a fact check and debunked the presence or involvement of Maxwell Yearick at the Butler rally in July 2024, noticing that online reports and social media denizens were saying Yearick was the shooter in Butler. In other words some of the folks who follow the Antifa actors pegged this event as belonging to Yearick. But we cannot conclusively say that Yearick was even in Butler that day. But we also can’t say why Yearick disappeared completely the next day and forever after. To the best of my knowledge, Yearick is still missing, more than a year later.

Considering all the anti-Trump activities going on, this is an unlikely year for a militant anti-Trump agitator to take a prolonged vacation. You’d think if Yearick was still alive, he’d be at the anti-ICE rallies.

Private Investigation

While the official story is that Crooks acted alone, a private investigator (PI) was hired by an unnamed private individual. Doug Hagmann, the PI, conducted his investigation using geofencing analyses.

A geofencing analysis tracks various electronic devices and how they interact or are at least aware of each other. In specific, Hagmann’s team was trying to find electronic devices that did not belong to Crooks but were found with him either at home, at school, or other places he frequented.

According to Newsweek, Hagmann concluded that Crooks was not working solo. In fact, this sort of event and Crooks’ electronics required extensive coordination and had to involve at least one other individual, possibly more than that. Crooks, like Lee Harvey Oswald, appears to be the patsy.

Hagmann did not name Yearick, but his research supported his notion that Crooks was not working alone. So if it wasn’t Maxwell Yearick, it was some other person(s).

What We Don’t Have

Thomas Matthew Crooks died on July 13, 2024 and he did not leave us much to work with.

• He didn’t leave us a manifesto or a diary

• He didn’t have a mission statement of any kind

• He had virtually no social media footprint

• He had no known close friends to interview

• He had no girlfriend

• His political leanings were weak and ambiguous; he donated $15 to a Democrat fundraising organization but he was a registered Republican

• He at one point was aspiring to be an engineer but suddenly abandoned that educational trajectory to take a low-level job in a nursing home for no apparent reason

• He lived with his parents, who were always very low profile and are now almost invisible

• He had no prior criminal record of any kind

• He had no history of violent behavior

• And as far as I can tell, except for some online searches about depression, was never diagnosed with mental illness or saw a mental health professional

• He did not use drugs or alcohol and he was stone cold sober when he was shot

• He was not taking psychiatric medications, either

It is clear he was learning about explosives and trying to make some homemade bombs; it is not clear how he expected to use them. It is also not clear why the explosives were in a white van with Arizona plates. If they belonged to Crooks, who owned the van? Or did those explosives belong to Arizona resident Maxwell Yearick?

It is very rare that the first time a person breaks the law, he does it to assassinate a presidential candidate. Most criminals ramp up their criminal activity gradually over time, starting small and working their way up. The Butler shooting suggests to me that Crooks may have been being groomed for this role rather than having it come to him more organically. Had he been a true political zealot, he might have started smaller. He might have started out protesting at a rally, carrying a sign, maybe even throwing a water bottle at a police officer. Going for broke on his first display of political activism suggests he was led into this role.

There is the theory that Crooks was severely mentally ill and suffered from depression. However, most depressed people find themselves drained of energy and ambition and attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate is a pretty big goal. It requires planning, energy, dedication, and work. I don’t think depressed people mastermind major assassinations. Plus he was not taking an antidepressants and generally, in this country, any person who tells a doctor they’re depressed gets a script for antidepressants.

We no longer have Crooks’s body. We have an autopsy report but without the body there is no way to go back and verify that (a) the body belonged to Thomas Matthew Crooks or (b) that the autopsy findings were accurate.

The fact it was left out all night on the roof and then brought to the coroner with no chain of custody report—and the fact that there is no record of how the medical examiner verified the body belonged to Crooks—is problematic. The body of Crooks is cremated and cannot be exhumed. Was it instead the body of another person?

We don’t have the cooperation of Crooks’ family who may or may not still live in their old home in Bethel near Butler. They are almost never seen there, but it is speculated they may come and go at odd hours. The house is not exactly abandoned and it is thought the Crooks family members are living in deep seclusion.

Nobody seems interested in this story. After all, Trump survived and got an iconic photograph and there is too much going on in our country right now to go back and ponder a confusing assassination attempt.

Theories, Conspiracy & Otherwise

The one theory that the mainstream media likes best is the one I like least: Crooks acted alone for motives unknown because that is just the way presidential assassins are. He was a true lone nut, in the great American tradition.

It is possible Crooks acted alone that day, but he was likely working or guided by one or more other people. That person could have been Maxwell Yearick or it could have been someone else. There may have been several other people. The reason Yearick pops out is that he has ties to the same town, a penchant for explosives and the use of guns, and he’s disappeared off the map right after the shooting. Plus the white van had Arizona plates. And unlike Crooks, Yearick has a track record almost a decade long of violence against the Trump campaign.

Reasons to Think Maxwell Yearick Might Have Been Involved

We should not be quick to dismiss the presence of Maxwell Yearick. This is all speculation, of course, but if it weren’t for the tinfoil hat brigade, we’d all believe Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut.

• Yearick had the compelling political motivations that young Crooks lacked

• Yearick’s family owned an explosives business, so Mawell Yearick might have had the skills to tutor Crooks in building improvised explosives. It is a confirmed fact that Crooks was building his own homemade explosives

• Both Crooks and Yearick lived in the same town at times and went to the same gun club; while there is no proof they knew each other, the population of Butler, Pennsylvania is 13,502 people. It’s more unlikely they didn’t know each other

• Yearick’s family in Arizona reported that in July of 2024 (before the Butler shooting) that Maxwell Yearick was not home and his whereabouts were unknown. Yearick was not a missing person at that time—he was a grown man, so perhaps this was just the way he rolled. What is odd is that he has disappeared without even an electronic trace after the Butler rally

• Yearick had trained Kurdish fighters before, so he was used to the role of training other young men for battle

• Yearick had ties to Ukraine, which parallels the other Trump would-be killer Ryan Routh

• There are online speculations that Yearick also new Ryan Routh but nothing that can be verified

• The poor handling of the corpse (left out all night, no chain of custody) and rapid cremation also point to a desire to hide some information

• The body that was autopsied cannot be conclusively identified as the body of Thomas Matthew Crooks—that doesn’t mean it wasn’t him, but it means that the people in charge were ridiculously, even criminally, sloppy

While geofencing techniques were used to suggest the Crooks activity was guided and coordinated by another party or parties, simple logistics suggests that a kid like Crooks (as smart as he was) could not have carried this kind of plot out without a lot of help and suggestions. Even if Yearick wasn’t involved, Thomas Matthew Crooks likely had help.

What Does It Mean if Yearick Was Involved?

The only thing I think it means is that we are not getting the truth and usually that indicates there is something somebody wants to hide. Obviously, the convenient story is that Thomas Matthew Crooks was a “lone nut” who did it all by himself for unknown reasons.