If he shortened the length of the stock, where is the damage to the buffer tube? In the FBI picture with the stock collapsed, there is no damage shown. If a bullet struck the buffer tube it would show in that picture.
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@sgt-raven yes, you are right!
he cannot have collapsed the stock!
this implies that he must have used the non-collapsed stock position, which would have looked like this:
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My mistake, I was hoping you’d do the photo from his left side.
no worries. the image can be flipped easily:
I used this image as a starting point as we know the exact ratio between the size of his head and the rifle based on the “original” version:
and the rifle I have overlayed on this image has been scaled to the exact size of the contours of the handle, scope and stock…
would it be a fair claim that we can conclude from this exercise that he was less proficient with his rifle than we have heretofore assumed?
remember that it is all about the wording: +40 visits to the range does not imply that he went shooting +40 times…
he could just as well have signed the register and gone for an ice cream or something similar as many times as he wanted…
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It depends. Some of us were trained to shoot NTCH. I’ve seen a lot of pics/videos of other people who position their head further back on the stock. But I have always been a bit of a ‘stock crawler’ and prefer a rifle with a shorter ‘length of pull’ than others. It is more important to position your eye in the same place every time you shoulder the rifle.
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Smart to just flip the image.
Ultimately I guess it doesn’t matter where his nose is in relation to the charging handle. His neck might be in alignment with the rear of the stock in the fashion he holds it whilst aiming, the stock is up against his shoulder and from some angles a bullet pass-thru his neck might take off the top of the buttstock.
The reason I asked is that one of many plausible theories is that in the moments before his death, Crooks turned west and was pointing the rifle in the general western direction. In the discussion of when/how the stock was damaged, your flipped image would be consistent with Crooks facing west, pointing the rifle west, with the rifle correctly shouldered with his nose on the charging handle, and a shot coming from the south, thru his mouth/neck exiting his right neck and passing thru the buttstock.
Nah, I don’t think it’s determinative other than suggesting he was never “trained” by someone with solid grasp and/or military training on how to hold it. He’s a tall guy and this might just be more comfortable, he may have had bad training on how to hold the rifle and never been corrected. One could still presumably be capable but it’s just not the correct way to hold it. But many people, like great guitarists or baseball players, held their guitars or bats “wrong” too…
Edited: Something I had not considered but might be a factor is that he clearly has poor eyesight, wears glasses. We don’t know the nature of his vision but perhaps the red dot and/or iron sights are best seen from HIS vision by being farther back on the stock. So this might reflect his training and the best position for his face to best see the optics.
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Then the shot should come from elevated position.
Gary Melton from Paramount Tactical showed the picture at 23:53 of Dangerous Liberty Ep92 - New Revelations UNCENSORED Review and Analysis of Bodycam Footage
his little mouse pointer is just above what he has identified as the impact point of bullet 9 coming from the SWAT officer on the green:
Gary assumes that bullet 9 entered the buffer tube there and shattered the top part of the back of the stock…
his left pointing finger points at where Gary assumes bullet 9 went into the buffer tube:
also note once more that there is a reason why the fast buriers of information showed the evidence photo of this rifle pointing from left to right for the simple reason that they would otherwise have shown the bullet impact point into that buffer tube…
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Realistically, how do you only get evidence photos from a single angle? If they are truly evidence photos, are they not meant to be photographed and catalogued in as many angles as necessary to dissect the evidence?
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It’s if the face of criminal person should be photografed only from behind. 
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Sure thing Glowie Gary show us how it happened. He has plenty ARs around his business. He could shoot a buffer tube with the spring & buffer inside it. Do it with a camera pointing at it. Do it from 10-25 yds.
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Very good products indeed. And yet that one broke…
a) intentionally, by Crooks himself for some reason.
b) on shot 9, and the FBI is lying
c) on shot 10 from south Hercules, by the bullet
d) on shot 10, by the bullet
e) other
I say C
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If you apply even a small amount of imagination, Crooks probably moved from this exact position. He might have raised the stock to his shoulder making a shot straight thru possibly the cause of the stock damage.
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Explain to me the mouth, back of head, neck, and EYE. Even if there is only the entrance mouth exit neck(or vice versa)there is also an entrance or exit wound to the eye. The way it looks is as if he were against the rooftop when shot from behind that exited through the eye. But if it is an entrance wound, then it has a trajectory of coming from below and entering going an upward path. Does not make sense to me. I was studying gunshot entrance/exits and the rarities are what we have here.
this position is not the position in which the first intervention team found crooks on the roof…
the way I see the situation now is as follows:
- the 9th bullet, likely fired by the SWAT officer halfway the green between the rally area and AGR building 6, dazzled him, or maybe even injured him.
if Gary Melton is right about his assumption that the 9th bullet entered crooks’ rifle at the buffer tube and then shattered the rear end of the rifle, it is well possible that crooks got injured from that blast.
I do not know whether he is right or not. I assume the 9th bullet disturbed crooks, and he may have gotten somehow injured, but he was intact enough to sit upright and direct his rifle towards the crowd near the trees… - after crooks had recovered from the incoming bullet, he sat up right, faced the crowd near the trees, cheeked the rifle aiming towards them, and then, someone shot from the rally area towards him with an entry wound around his left cheek/jaw/chin, exit wound around his right cheek/jaw/chin and damaging the stock:
the above images show the position of the stock (held to the right part of his face, close to his shoulder and a bit further from his shoulder) should he have looked right…
the following pictures are reasonably to scale, as we know that crooks filled somehow 3/4th of the width of a roof lane:
the rifle and crooks’ head are accurately scaled 1:1 based on the picture taken by Mike DiFrischia I posted earlier with similar photos. the AGR building 6 photo is based on the drone footage made by @rough_country_gypsy.
I do not know the distance between the drone and the building when this picture was taken, but it is clear that it is not from a large distance, and crooks’ head and rifle get very small very quickly when looked at from a distance…
and the above schemes are very compatible with what RealDjStew documented:
as there is no autopsy report, it is not known what injuries crooks suffered from…
whether his eye was an entry wound or not, or whether the 9th or 10th bullet entered his mouth are pure speculation…
note that the bloody images cannot really be used to deduce whether the right side of his face was injured due to the bloodiness of the images, but I would rule out bullets coming from below, as the position he is in on these photos is not the position how/where het got shot…
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Generally someone who wears glasses low on the nose, has good distance and bad nearsightedness. He could even have bifocals and use for mid distance and close. He obviously wore them all the time around the complex. Possibly.
I read your account and looked at your pictures in different positions(which was very helpful). But, you still haven’t included the obvious bullet hole above the eye. If you look at it you will see. Sorry it does not fit in your model of what may have happened. That is why I point it out, so you can somehow account for and incorporate it.
“Exit wounds may be circular like entrance wounds, but they are more often irregular in shape. They may be slitlike or have ragged edges. They do not have a rim of abrasion like entrance wounds unless a victim’s skin is pressed against another object. This is called a “shored” exit wound. Skin around an exit wound may also be discolored because of underlying bleeding in the soft tissues.”
If I was unable to clearly see a perfect hole above his eye, I would agree.
We have an exit or entry in the right neck near his ear. From his position, best guess is that is the exit. We don’t know definitively where the entrance was; some people (myself included) speculate that it might have been right thru the mouth (there appears to be damage to his left upper lip area, adding to this theory) so the back of the throat would have been the actual entrance, offering little resistance and not a spectacular exploded head nor “instant” death. I speculate this because had he been shot in the side of the head or face, with a large caliber rifle, I would expect his head to explode into millions of pieces with brain matter everywhere due to hydrostatic shock and other physics.
I do also see a round “hole” over his left eye. I don’t know what that is. But I would expect if that were the entrance it would have likely blown/destroyed his eye, which is clearly bulged but intact. I’d also expect the skull resistance to have exploded his head like a balloon, unless the bullet navigated somehow thru his eye socket without destroying his eye, blowing up his head, and exiting his neck. I think that unlikely. Look at the near perfect face imprint in blood, we can see both eyes are open and if his left eye had been shot I’d expect blood to have poured out that area, which is not what we see. I think the bulged but intact eye is from hydro shock, but can’t explain the round injury - perhaps that was from his glasses somehow damaging his eye lid?
It appears that death was possibly quick but not instant, due to the amount of blood loss, suggesting the heart pumped for a few more moments. Just a lethal wound thru the throat/neck, maybe brain stem damage, etc. That again, is speculation. I am no doctor. He could have supposedly just leaked blood even while dead. But again I’m no doctor. I have seen a lot of dead people in war though.
As it remains the bulged eye socket and eyeball are consistent with some low levels of hydro-static shock. This is a common result. Example: Ever caught a mouse in a spring trap? Big snap on the neck, their eyes often bulge out due to the immense pressure applied.
If you watch videos of large caliber bullets hitting objects like full soda bottles or water mellons and similar you’ll get a good idea of what the head does when struck “solidly” by a large caliber bullet. The fact Crooks head is “mostly” intact suggests to me, the bullet entered his mouth, perhaps left cheek? (meeting no resistance), but actually penetrated the back of his throat and exited his neck. Had it hit his head solidly I’d have expected to see very little of his head remaining.
As a for instance, I watched a suicide video of a Iraq war vet who famously streamed it online. He placed a large caliber hunting rifle under his chin and pulled the trigger. His head exploded akin to popping a balloon, leaving nothing but maybe 20-30% of his empty skin, a fleshy emptiness, and a enormous bloody mess of brain matter and head parts. Instant, decapitated, headless corpse sitting in a chair. That’s what I’d have expected had Crooks been hit in the actual brain cavity of his head with any high caliber rifle round.
And thankfully Trump avoided that fate that day as well.
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Can someone show me the image of the bullet wound over the left eye?
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to me it is not that obvious that he has a bullet hole above the eye…
I know certain people claim that he has an entry wound around the eye and that that bullet exited his neck, but I simply do not know…
about stippling gunshots and tattooing: that is something that is seen with suicides or with close distance gunshot wounds, but this is not what one would expect when looking at longer distance gunshot wounds…
I do not have a certain model in which things need to be pushed…
I look at the evidence and fit the puzzle pieces together.
if there are puzzle pieces that do not fit, the story is not clear, and then we wait until additional evidence pieces or analyses become available, and we see where we get with that information…
it depends who fired the 9th or 10th bullet:
- from my view, the SWAT officer who fired the 9th bullet may also have fired the 10th bullet, and this could have led to:
- damage to the buffer tube if the senator’s report is to be believed, and the 10th bullet
- may have entered him in his lower left chin/cheek/jaw with an exit wound at the opposite side of his face, damaging the stock if it had not been damaged by the 9th bullet
- given that the SWAT officer only fired the 9th bullet,
- the 10th bullet may have been a higher caliber (.300 Winchester Magnum) if it originated from any of the barn snipers, but if the Washington Co. sniper fired from across the green, he would have used different, potentially less devastating, caliber…
- it is also possible that another SWAT officer or another person with a rifle fired the 10th round…
we know that crooks was looking to the right in the direction of the witnesses near the trees after he had interacted with the 9th shot, and he was also pointing his rifle towards these people.
if the 9th bullet had damaged his rifle significantly, I would not think that he had still kept it in his hand while looking at the crowd on the right and directing his rifle towards them…
if the 9th bullet had shattered the stock, I would have expected the rifle to be kicked out of his hand, or similar…
we see there is a significant blood trail in the 20th lane on the roof.
this means that he did not die immediately after he got shot:
- if the 9th bullet caused serious harm, he may have started bleeding until the 10th bullet finished him off
- if the 9th bullet did not cause huge blood loss, the 10th shot must have done so
- it is even possible that he was still alive when the first responders arrived on the roof: they deemed it necessary to handcuff him, and it is not necessary for a dead body to be handcuffed…
- it is even possible that (under the assumption that he fired any shots) that injury above his eye was caused by a hot ejected casing…
yes, caliber and gun placement are very important…
a movie I can recommend related to that topic is Liebestraum: Liebestraum (1991) - IMDb
absolutely true, and the flag above Trump’s podium was flying in a nearly horizontal position, meaning the slightest, gentler breeze would have caused total disaster…
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