Just over a week after Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, nearly assassinating former President Trump and killing firefighter Corey Comperatore, the 20-year-old’s neighbors are grappling with the reality of the “evil’ that lurked down the street.
“That’s sheer fear. If [Trump] had his head turned, he would’ve had his brains blown out, and that was manufactured around the corner from my house,” said a neighbor who lives about the same distance from the Crooks home that the shooter was from the president when Crooks opened fire.
“There was such evil around the corner,” she said Tuesday. “We’re always going to have a scar from what happened and how close to us [it was].”
Another woman who regularly runs through the neighborhood said she passed Crooks in their quiet neighborhood several times over the summer. Despite her attempts to “look over and smile and say hello,” he would “look up as though nobody had been passing him.”
That woman said she was shocked when she heard the news of the shooting just 40 minutes away from her house. Things got even more “surreal” when she realized the perpetrator lived far closer to home than she thought.
“When I first thought about the shooter being in Butler, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s in my backyard.’ It ended up being closer. All of a sudden, it’s a neighbor,” she said.
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An elderly woman down the street from the Crooks said she hadn’t talked much to the gunman, but he would regularly help her with household chores.
“I would ask Tom, ‘Would you rake the leaves? Could you shovel the driveway?’ If I saw their mail, I’d pick it up,” she said. “You get shocked, but you also get mad that something like this happened.”
Although reporters and police vehicles still dot the neighborhood of brick houses, four residents who spoke with Fox News Digital all expressed relief things were finally calming down. After the shooting, they said, police evacuated those who lived closest to the Crooks home on Milford Drive for a 24-hour period.
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They said they weren’t told where to go, only that they needed to evacuate due to a bomb investigation. Meanwhile, their small street swelled with law enforcement vehicles as reporters were relegated to a faraway post atop a nearby hill.
“My wife and I used to watch police shows on TV,” another neighbor said Tuesday. “I would always ask her, jokingly, ‘Why don’t they stumble into our neighborhood and break down doors.’ … It was a heavy police presence.”
That neighbor said two FBI agents questioned him for about a half hour days ago and that he could “not have imagined the depths to which they investigated” the neighborhood.
“They wanted to know whether I noticed any unusual activity, any unusual noises, whether I noticed people from the house [in the neighborhood],” the neighbor said. “They asked if I might know anybody in the neighborhood who might know more than me.”
Investigators visited the Crooks home for about an hour Monday, one of at least three times they spoke to the family over the past week. Packages remained on the doorstep for at least a day before they are taken inside, and carriers do not appear to be putting mail into the family’s mailbox.
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Each residence was visited by agents. Multiple times, they knocked on the door of a couple that they could not reach because they were away on vacation. Returning from their trip on Tuesday, they told Fox News Digital they had never seen any members of the Crooks clan despite living several houses down the street.
Kelly Little, who lives directly across the street from the Crooks home, said her 6-month-old dog has been quickly socialized by the “hundreds” of reporters and law enforcement officers who have come through the community.
Usually, Little said, children play in the neighborhood. Even though barriers blocking Milford Drive were moved this week, the typical bustle of the community has yet to return.
One neighbor said the block is “extremely close. Regardless, none of the neighbors seemed to know the family or their infamous son, personally.
“I still feel very safe around here,” a neighbor said. “I still feel safe, I just … I’m very disappointed that this is what Bethel Park is going to be known for.”
