Dan Grzybek, a Democrat who serves on the Allegheny County council and lives down the street from the shooter’s home in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, described the shock that local residents are experiencing after a neighbor attempted to assassinate the former president.
“No one ever expects that something like this would be done by someone who lives right in their neighborhood,” Grzybek told NBC News.
Grzybek said when he was running for his county council seat last fall, he met Crooks’ parents while going door-knocking in the neighborhood. Speaking at the family’s front door, Grzybek said he had a “very pleasant conversation” with Crooks’ parents. Grzybek said he had not previously met the shooter.
It was a “very typical voter conversation,” Grzybek said. “Most people, the first thing they’re asking is not your party registration. It’s more so, ‘OK, what do you want to do on county council? So we were talking about things like local air quality and how we’re handling incarceration. Those were the conversations that we were steered towards. And I think that the partisanship of politics tended to stay out of the conversation.”
As for how constituents are responding to the news, Grzybek said residents “are worried this is going to give Bethel Park a bad reputation or a bad rap.”
“And, obviously, people have a lot of pride in their community and where they live, and Bethel Park is a really great place to live,” he said. “And we have some really fantastic neighbors who are trying to come together. And overwhelmingly, the rhetoric that I’ve heard is that people want to turn down the temperature and don’t want something like this to escalate any further. Because there is always that possibility when someone takes such a drastic action, like trying to assassinate the president of the United States, that there will be, I don’t want to say inevitable, but there’s a high probability of there being a reaction to that. And I think that’s what people are most concerned about is that nothing like that kind of takes place. And that in this already very divided environment that we live, in that it doesn’t become even more so and even more dangerous.”
Politically, Bethel Park is one of the most closely divided townships in Allegheny County, a Democratic stronghold that is home to Pittsburgh. But Grzybek said the community has pulled together on many occasions, including after severe flooding in 2018.
“I’ve heard a lot of people that are concerned about the parents and what they’re going through right now,” he said. “So I think it’s important that, yeah, Bethel Park is a very split partisan place. And we have a very wide array of opinions across the political spectrum. But I think a really great, a much better example, if you’re looking for what Bethel Park is like, is if you want to look back to the floods we had a few years ago that really decimated a lot of the community and how well the community was able to come together and care for one another. I think that is much more indicative of a place that Bethel Park is.
