Trump shooter's neighbor said 'something didn't feel right' before rally and Crooks had 'bad vibes'

A woman who lives just around the corner from the home of Thomas Matthew Crooks said "something didn't feel right " on the morning of the deadly Donald Trump rally shooting, and so she opted not to attend it last minute.

The longtime Bethel Park, Pennsylvania , resident also described the "bad vibes" she got from the 20-year-old the few times she saw him walking around the neighborhood in recent months, painting a picture of the awkward man who would go on to shoot the former president in the ear at a rally about 50 miles north in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one and critically injuring two others in the process.

"I was going to go. I set my alarm for 5 a.m., and I had my clothes out, ready to go," Amy told TheMirror.com, describing the excitement she felt leading up to the fateful rally. "I was just going to throw them on, not even do makeup, nothing."

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The 56-year-old said she had plans to drive up and meet some friends, but then, she decided not to. She sat in her home for around an hour, toiling with the idea.

"Something didn't feel right. Not like an overwhelming [feeling], but something didn't feel right," she said. "Usually, I'm just like, 'Throw your stuff on. Just go. Just do it.'" She couldn't quite place the feeling she had, but it was enough to give her pause.

She then settled on the heat that day as a factor, saying it would end up being her deciding factor. She looked at weather forecasts for the day, saw that it was slated to be over 90 degrees Fahrenheit and opted not to go.

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Later that night, she said she was sitting in her home with her husband, watching the rally live on TV. "I heard the pops," she said. "I knew what the pops were 'cause I'm familiar with guns. I knew exactly what it was." She said it took her husband, who she said knows all about rifles, a second to register what the couple had just heard.

Then, the shock settled in. "It was just sick. I'm still sick to my stomach," the Trump supporter said. "The first thing I said to my husband was, 'If he had his head turned, he would have been temple shot right away.'" She added that it was even more shocking that such an incident could occur in Butler.

It wasn't until later that she found out the shooter lived not more than a block from her. "I had just finished watching the news conference, and they weren’t naming him," she said, referring to the conference held on Saturday evening, the day after the shooting. "I thought, ‘Oh, he’s going to be from Butler or something.'"

Then, she said her daughter, who also lives near Bethel Park, messaged her and told her she heard the shooter was from the neighborhood. Moments later, she said a neighbor texted her and told her to "look down the street."

"They had descended upon us," she said, referring to the FBI and other local authorities who had swarmed the quaint residential street where Crooks lived.

"We saw them all rolling in," she said of her and several of her neighbors. "It was like, 'What?'" She added, "The whole neighborhood was out, and we were just standing there." Nobody got sleep that night, she said.

Then, the cops came up to them as the small group watched the raid going down from the side street where Amy lives. "We were told immediately to get back in our homes and stay there, so we congregated at one home and talked for a while in shock, complete shock," she said.

“Nobody expects [this could happen] in their neighborhood," Amy, who has been living in Bethel Park for 30 years, added. "Stuff like this doesn’t happen here. Bethel Park is like your basic, good suburban community of Pittsburgh. Everyone gets along. Everyone helps each other. There’s a lot of square mileage to Bethel Park — it’s pretty big — and everyone, we have our differences, but we [get along]."

A community comes together

Conversing with the authorities, Amy said residents were told that the shooter hadn't yet been identified — but everyone in the community already knew his name and where he lived, as some residents had done some digging and posted the information to local social media groups.

For the next day and a half, Amy said her street and the street where Crooks lived were closed. Crooks' street remains closed to through traffic, with several strands of yellow police tape tethered to a stop sign and utility pole on opposite sides of the street.

But amid the lockdown, she said her community blossomed. The area of Bethel Park where Amy lives is full of patriotic residents, many of them Trump supporters, and it's not uncommon to drive by and see American flags waving from polls attached to front porches or "Trump 2024" signs out in front yards.

After the investigation engulfed the neighborhood, however, the number of flags and signs exploded, with many residents who Amy said had been "afraid" to show their support for the former president in the months leading up to the 2024 election now placing their signs out in their front yards on full display.

One of the signs in Amy's yard has the words "Faith, Family, Freedom" in large letters over a patriotic-looking background.

On Saturday night, after the lockdown was imposed on the residents of Amy's street — those closer to the Crooks' home were evacuated for fear of a "suspicious device," other neighbors told TheMirror.com — she said she "got in trouble" with the authorities because they caught her out in her yard. She had been placing the "Faith, Family, Freedom" sign out front.

"It was too soon to put it out in my yard — I put it out along my house. I had it up against my house where the bushes were," she said, referring to when she first got the sign some several weeks ago. "It was there before this happened — your typical political sign. It would irritate me to put it out on the street too soon. But now, it is."

In the days since then, after the lockdown was lifted and residents were allowed to go about their business as usual, Amy said several of her neighbors have driven by her home, seen the sign and stopped, asking her where they might be able to get one of their own.

"The other neighbors throughout the neighborhood have said that they are more adamant on showing their support, and I know people that were afraid before that are putting signs out," she said. "I just had more dropped off to my house."

She added that she's still a bit scared — she fears retribution in the community for her support of former President Trump, which is why she asked that TheMirror.com not publish her last name. But her fear is not going to stop her.

"I’m not going to back down because I have to be who I am. I’m patriotic. I’m true to myself," she said.

'Bad vibes'

The first time Amy saw Thomas Matthew Crooks walking around her neighborhood, she said it was a typical day sometime "after spring." She had been working in her yard when she spotted him out of the corner of her eye.

"It was out of the blue about a month, month and a half ago. He was just walking with his head down like this," Amy said. She demonstrated his walk, shuffling her feet along the road, her eyes staring at the pavement in an awkward, dejected manner.

"At one point, he turned his head," Amy said. "He did make eye contact with me by going like this." Here, modeling Crooks, she slowly turned her hung head sideways, looking at the group of reporters who had congregated on the street to speak with her, giving them all a creepy side-eye.

"I only made eye contact with him once because I caught him. A lot of times, I’m digging or whatever," she added. She said she couldn't recall whether or not he had any headphones in or what he was wearing, but the way he walked and held his head stood out to her.

"It’s really hard to describe without [demonstrating] — it’s just odd," she said. "Myself and the other person who would see him out just recently had bad vibes about him. We had seen him separately at different times."

"I did not have a good feeling when he was walking up the street," she said. "Let’s just put it that way."

The last time Amy said she saw Crooks was about a month to a month and a half ago and that she saw him exactly three times. Before that, she hadn't seen him since he was an elementary school student.

The Crooks family kept to themselves, she said, so much so that she said she hasn't seen the parents since they moved in around 27 or 28 years ago — just a few years after Amy. If she saw them on the street today, she said she "wouldn't even recognize them."

"I never saw them. I drive up and down the street all the time because it’s the way we get out to go to the main roads, and I never saw them out," she said.

"They’ve lived here a long time. I’ve lived here, and I never saw them in 30 years. That’s how long of a history I have in this neighborhood, and most of these people here have lived here for a very long time, a very long time," she continued. "N obody knew them. Like nobody knew them."

Often, Amy says she takes walks around the neighborhood late at night, around 10 p.m. some nights "just to let steam off" or to "relax." She said she's never been able to see in the windows of the Crooks' home, to catch even the slightest glimpse into their lives. She found that strange.

A few times, looking back on it, she said she thought she may have seen Crooks or his father, Matthew, cutting the grass on a tractor, but those were the only times she saw anyone from the family in as many as 15 years — before Crooks began creeping her and other neighbors out as he awkwardly walked with his head down, going up and down each street.

Amy added that, in conversations with other neighbors, none of them recall seeing Crooks or his family when they went to pick their children up from extracurricular events at the local schools Crooks also attended, with another neighbor, a high school student who met Crooks briefly during the year they were students together at Bethel Park High School, telling TheMirror.com that Crooks kept to himself at school.

The other neighbor who saw Crooks, who Amy didn't name, told Amy that she had seen the young man more recently than Amy had, as recently as a week to a week and a half before the day of the shooting. But Amy didn't elaborate on what the other neighbor had seen during those instances — just that they both got "bad vibes" from Crooks.