Walking home through her tidy neighborhood of red-brick houses, in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, on Sunday afternoon, Amanda Lovas, clad in a bikini and flip-flops, was startled to discover a dozen or so sweating reporters pressed against a piece of yellow caution tape along Highland Road, where she lives. Many were peering through cameras with telephoto lenses, straining to see inside the home of her neighbor Thomas Matthew Crooks. He’d been killed by the Secret Service the day before, at a rally about an hour’s drive away. Authorities said that he’d tried to assassinate Donald Trump. One of Crooks’s bullets had grazed the ear of the former President; Crooks had killed one spectator and injured two others.
“I rode the bus to school with him for years,” Lovas told me, astonished, when I crossed the street to speak to her. She’d spent much of the afternoon escaping the ninety-three-degree heat—and a disconcerting new reality—by tubing in a nearby river. “I didn’t know that so many bad things can happen so close to you,” she said.
Bethel Park is a politically and economically mixed community, where houses range in price from less than a hundred thousand dollars to a half million. Some have pools and pickleball courts; others, like the ones in Lovas and Crooks’s neighborhood, are ranch homes with garden gnomes and kids’ bikes in the front yards.
Although Lovas, who graduated from Bethel Park High in 2021, had waited at the same bus stop with Crooks for years, she hadn’t really known him. “He was pretty quiet, and also a year younger than me,” she said. For a brief stint in seventh grade, Lovas had been friends with his sister. “I taught her handshakes and stuff like that,” she added.
Lovas preferred to avoid politics. “I try to remain oblivious,” she said. This wasn’t going to be possible. Outsiders were pressing in. At a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts, one longtime resident showed me private posts from a community Facebook group. In the closed group, residents had asked whether Crooks had seemed “like an outcast or someone that would do this.” Classmates offered what they could. Crooks hadn’t really “raised any flags,” one wrote. He was beloved by their history teacher for being “very smart very passionate about history.” He was “overall pretty reserved,” another added. Some media reports suggested that he’d been bullied, but the commenters said nothing about that. He “didn’t seem like anything was ever off.”
An hour’s drive to the north, the Butler Farm Show grounds remained closed to visitors on Sunday afternoon. State troopers in gray S.U.V.s with flashing lights blocked off several entrances. Behind the chain-link fence, an enormous American flag, which appears behind Trump in photos from the shooting, snapped between two towering cranes.
About two dozen people who’d attended the rally the day before waited outside the grounds, hoping to be allowed back in for items that they’d been forced to abandon after the attack. One was Todd Gerhart, a honey merchant who keeps eleven thousand hives in South Carolina. He told me that he’d left behind two thousand dollars’ worth of his signature product: squeezable plastic honey bears with Trump’s face. Before the rally, he’d met two elderly women, who ended up standing very close to Corey Comperatore, the man whom Crooks killed. Later, he met them again. “They took pictures and asked me if I wanted to see them,” Gerhart told me. “But I said no. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.”
Erin Autenreith, a real-estate agent and a volunteer at the event, had been seated in the front row. “There was no one between him and me,” she said, of Trump, when we spoke over the phone. “I didn’t see a picture of his blood—I saw his blood.” Since the shooting, Autenreith had managed to sleep and drink some coffee, but she was still in shock. She kept thinking back to the moment when, in second grade at Catholic school, she had learned that John F. Kennedy had been shot. She recalled that nuns had told the children to kneel and pray for the President. At the Trump rally, she’d been baffled that, once shots were fired, no one had started to run. “The freakiest thing is that people didn’t want to leave,” she said. “It was like it turned into a memorial service. They had to be ushered out.”
Not everyone at the rally was a fan of Trump. Tim Maddocks and his wife, Erin Kello, drove out from Pittsburgh because they saw it as a historic event. In the weeks following Biden’s dismal debate performance, Maddocks grew more and more certain that Trump would be elected. “I asked myself, ‘If I had a time machine, would I go back and watch Hitler and Mussolini?’ ” he said. He added, “I don’t think that Trump is on their level.”
For many who lingered around the farm-show grounds on Sunday, shock was giving way to certainty that Donald Trump was going to be the next President of the United States. At a merch stand across from the fairground, Chloe Wiley, who had spent much of the past three weeks in a U-Haul trailer by the roadside, was overrun with customers. Her stock of T-shirts—with sayings like “I’D RATHER VOTE FOR A FELON THAN A JACKASS” and “JESUS IS MY SAVIOR, TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT”—was running thin.
She was out of red MAGA hats, and had marked up the blue ones that remained from thirty dollars to forty.
“Hey, he got shot, so prices go up!” she said. Crystal Jennings, who runs a suicide-prevention hotline in Youngstown, Ohio, had come to Butler to show her support for Trump. “We’ve been getting so many calls in the last nine months,” she told me. “A lot of people can’t afford food, and I’m not saying that’s on Biden, but we didn’t have this under Trump.” Jennings considered an “EVEN MY DOG HATES BIDEN” tee, but she felt vaguely bad about the slogan. “These kinds of T-shirts are funny, but they make people angry and our country more divided,” she said.
A father and daughter pulled off the highway. They’d driven from the nearby township of Slippery Rock, they explained, because they were in a standoff with some neighbors, who’d taken to displaying Biden and Pride paraphernalia. They were looking for T-shirts to really piss off the neighbors, the daughter, age fifteen, explained.
“Do you have the ‘YOU MISSED’ T-shirts?” she asked Wiley.
“They’re being printed as we speak,” Wiley replied. ♦
