BETHEL PARK, Pa. — To understand this quiet Pittsburgh suburb, just ask Gary Turney whether it’s a pleasant place to live.
Turney, 70, a retired machinist, has been in the community for more than three decades, and, for the most part, he has enjoyed it.
“Except in the winter time, when they plow the street, they salt it, he always shifts his salt right there at the stop sign,” said Turney, pointing out the window of his modest brick home at a four-way intersection just outside. “It wakes you up,” he said with a laugh.
That’s the biggest complaint here: the noisy salt trucks during the snowy months. That’s Bethel Park in a nutshell.
It’s an unassuming working-class community of about 30,000, where people live private lives and keep to themselves.
That's, in part, why recent events struck like a thunderbolt: when they discovered the 20-year-old man who attempted to assassinate former President Trump at a rally grew up here, thrusting this largely overlooked Pennsylvania suburb into international headlines.
“It floored me. It’s unbelievable,” Turney said. “What is it, two blocks up the street?”
Federal investigators are still probing for what may have prompted the July 13 assassination attempt, but scant evidence has emerged of a clear motive.
On Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the gunman did a Google search before the shooting of “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy,” a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald’s 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“That’s a search obviously that is significant in terms of his state of mind,” Wray said, noting that the search happened the same day the gunman registered for the Trump rally in Butler, Pa., about an hour away from Bethel Park.
As the investigation unfolds, the shooter’s community is hoping for the glare of media scrutiny to end.
A few days of strolling up and down the streets of Bethel Park and talking to residents revealed a neighborhood still stunned that one of its own attempted to assassinate former President Trump, but after nearly two weeks of nonstop attention, residents are ready to move beyond the violent episode.
And a look around the area shows signs of a receding crisis.
Police tape around the shooter’s house has been taken down; the big broadcast TV trucks have left; the scrum of reporters around the house has been reduced to a sole cameraman.
Chesleah Kribs, 30, a homeowner down the street from the shooter’s house, said she is still shaking off the startling knocks on the door she received from federal law enforcement officials around 3 a.m. the Sunday after the shooting.
“‘Everyone get out’ types of things, just given there was explosives and things of that nature that they were suspecting,” Kribs recalled recently.
Investigators discovered improvised explosives in the shooter’s car. Authorities evacuated Kribs and other neighbors. She was allowed to return around noon that Sunday.
“Right at 12:15 you saw neighbors just walking their dogs, whether it’s being nosy or just trying to get back to normal. That’s this community: Let’s just get back to normal,” she said
It’s a refrain echoed quite a bit across Bethel Park: Let’s all just heal and move beyond this in a united way.
Politically speaking, Bethel Park is anything but united, an emblematic snapshot of America’s political divisions. Both Democratic-leaning and Trump signs dot the yards around where the shooter lived.
In the 2020 presidential election, Bethel Park went for Trump by just 65 votes.
Kribs said she knows she and her neighbors do not see eye to eye on politics, but it has never been a problem.
“What we’ve been known for is just loving our neighbors and making sure that everyone knows that they are welcome, regardless of political standpoint, or anything else, we all are still Bethel Park and we have to kind of stay together,” she said.
The same day the police tape was removed from the shooter’s block, local Maddy Callicot, 18, decided to ride her bike down the street. She said there is just a different feeling in the air.
“You can tell that the vibe is different,” she said. “Definitely something is off.”
She, like most neighbors around the shooter, had never spoken to him, or his family, but chatter about the gunman has haunted her everywhere she goes – back home, the grocery store, at her job at a local country club. Everyone is talking about it, she said.
“Definitely terrifying that we are in the spotlight, but people seem to be treating it respectfully,” she said.
Right across the street from the gunman’s house is Eddie Stack.
On a recent evening, he sat on his porch watching the Pittsburgh Pirates game and drinking a beer as his English Black Lab named Lady ran around the yard.
He described the gunman as “a quiet nerdy kid” who never went out of his way to chat with neighbors.
“Nobody I talked to really knew the family, and we never met the kid,” he said, referring to the shooter.
He said Bethel Park will move past this dark chapter. When asked why, he offered a pithy reply.
“Because we’re resilient,” he said.
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