Is a white van at the Trump shooting more proof that we put the AZ in crazy?

The nation’s gaze has moved on from the near-assassination of Donald Trump to the coronation of Kamala Harris.

But let’s not do that, just yet.

At least not until we prove a point, to wit, that if something infamous happens in America it always has an Arizona connection.

Police swarm a white van after Trump shooting

Most Americans didn’t pay attention to a certain small detail about Donald Trump’s brush with death in Butler, Pa., but it involves our state, so we will.

Soon after Trump’s July 13 rally ended in a burst of gunfire, a mysterious white van with an Arizona license plate was spotted in a neighborhood adjacent to the fairgrounds.

Billy Thoma, one of the neighbors, told Fox News he got home a little before 5 p.m., saw a van with the Arizona plate parked on the street “and didn’t think much of it.”

Pretty soon his street was lined with police officers — roughly five to 10 patrol cars, with cops and perhaps other law enforcement types surrounding the vehicle.

When one of the cops opened the van door, “everyone jumped back,” Thoma said.

He didn’t know why, but he certainly was fearful there could be a bomb aboard. It put him a little on edge, he said.

Did Fox News get it mixed up?

On July 18, Fox reported that “law enforcement combed through a white van believed to have been used by Thomas Matthew Crooks,” the gunman who shot at Trump.

“Officers found explosives, including an improvised explosive device, inside the van, sources confirmed to Fox News.

“The sources could not say how many explosives or what kind but emphasized that more than one was found. There were also bomb-making materials found inside Crooks' house, the sources told Fox News.”

Best GOP response to Trump shooting: Grace

However, in its report, Fox linked to a story about authorities finding explosives in Crooks’ car, not a van, and those included an IED or improvised explosive device.

It appears Fox may have confused the two vehicles. Other news services, including CNN, reported that law enforcement searched Crooks’ Hyundai Sonata that he had driven to the fairgrounds in Butler the day of the shooting.

Amateur sleuths are on the case

Investigators found inside the car “an improvised explosive device hidden in the trunk that was wired to a transmitter he carried,” CNN reported.

So, what happened to the white van?

People on the street videotaped law enforcement putting it on a trailer and hauling it away.

In his testimony to Congress on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray did not mention the van, so it isn’t clear if the FBI believes it is connected.

Meanwhile, amateur sleuths with an eye on rural Pennsylvania are asking questions and speculating what the van was doing there and whether it is material to the shooting.

Why this story matters to Arizona

As for us, we’re left to wonder why Arizona has a connection to every crazy story that comes down the pike.

Perhaps it’s because no one does crazy like Arizona does crazy.

I recently wrote about the famous brawl that broke out in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium in 1974 that ended in drunken fans swarming the field and slugging it out with Major League Baseball players and umpires.

That happened because the Cleveland Indians decided to sell beer for 10 cents a cup.

And the Arizona connection?

That 10-cent beer night was the brainchild of an Arizona State University business major, the son of the owner of the Cleveland Indians.

In the years that followed, every crazy story would have its Arizona tie-in.

From murder to terrorism, there's an Arizona tie

When O.J. Simpson murdered his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her acquaintance Ron Goldman, it seemed that there would be no Arizona connection. That was strictly a Hollywood horror scene.

But soon after, Goldman’s father would move to Scottsdale and become an eloquent spokesman for his son and other crime victims on Valley news.

That O.J. case was in 1994.

That same year, a couple of thugs kneecapped Olympic figure-skater Nancy Kerrigan, trying to eliminate her from the Winter Games and take out Tonya Harding's main rival for the figure-skating gold.

You’d have thought Arizona would never be involved in something like that. It happened in Cobo Arena in Detroit in a winter sport. Arizona is largely a desert.

But the Arizona connection was strong. One of the goons who assaulted Kerrigan lived in Phoenix and bought a black tactical baton at a Spy Headquarters shop in the Valley and used it to strike Kerrigan’s leg. It would later be dubbed the “Tonya Tapper.”

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing nearly 170 people. And wouldn’t you know it, he was a Kingman, Ariz., resident.

Let's hope some poor guy wants his van back

Just when you thought we’d seen the weird outer limits of Arizona entanglements came 2001 and one of the biggest stories of the century — the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Once again, it turned out that some of the Middle Eastern jihadists who flew airplanes into buildings had trained at an Arizona flight school.

In 2021, we had the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and, of course, it was the Arizona shaman with his crazy buffalo horns who become the iconic image of that national outrage.

We still don’t know what’s behind the mysterious white van with Arizona plates in Butler, Pa., or why it attracted so much law-enforcement interest.

I’m hoping some poor schlub from, say, Casa Grande, was just minding his own business when he, by chance, parked his bleached-white babe magnet near the Butler Farm Show Grounds on the worst day in that town’s history.

I’m hoping he’s yelling at the FBI right now to give it back, because he has a date tonight.

Somebody has to break the cycle.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Trump shooting mystery van puts Arizona in the spotlight ... again