A neighbor of the Highland Park mass shooting suspect revealed on Tuesday that she has a crush on the alleged killer and feels guilty about turning him down several years ago.
“I’m just thinking about him,” Amy, who declined to provide her last name, said of the suspected murderer Robert “Bobby” Crimo III.
“I didn’t go to sleep last night and I haven’t eaten for two days,” Amy told The Post in a Tuesday night interview.
The 21-year-old lives near Crimo’s father’s home — but said she first met Crimo, also 21, as a fast-food colleague at Panera in March 2020.
The pair became friends when they worked at the eatery for about a month together before the chain restaurant closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In that short time, Amy and Crimo — who has been charged with seven counts of first-degree for the Fourth of July horror — developed feelings for one another, she said.
“He said he liked me,” Amy said, but added that they never dated because her “strict” parents don’t allow her to.
“I was like but I don’t date. I can’t date,” she said.
Still, working together gave her and Crimo plenty of opportunities to chat and learn about each other’s interests.
“I felt like we’re the same person,” she said. “We liked anime [and] similar music.”
Amy said she had no idea that Crimo, an aspiring rapper, took an interest in guns and other weapons and hadn’t known about his past suicide attempt.
“He never told me about his social medias, or his mom, or political views, owning guns or his suicide attempt,” she said. “I never knew about that. Looking back I think he wanted to keep it from me.”
Amy said Crimo, however, did speak about his dream to open a deli with his father. According to the Chicago Sun Times, his father owned and operated Bob’s Pantry & Deli in Highland Park from 2013 to 2018.
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Crimo reportedly said he’d hold off on the aspiration so that he could continue working at Panera with Amy.
She told him not to sacrifice his dream for her.
“I [didn’t] want to be in his way,” she said. “So I thought maybe if I stopped talking to him, he would do it.”
She worried cutting ties with him made him angry. Eventually, he stopped waving to greet her when they passed each other in the neighborhood.
“Every day I would see him go by and he wouldn’t say hi or bye anymore,” Amy said. “I feel like I hurt him. I feel like I might have been something like a broken glass that stabbed him, that might have hurt him. So I feel guilty that this happened.”
She believes something must have broken him to cause him to go out and shoot innocent people — resulting in the deaths of seven people.
“He was kind of like the last person I would suspect,” Amy said. “I feel like obviously something pushed him to this.”
Crimo was charged on Tuesday with seven counts of first-degree murder for his alleged parade massacre. He faces a mandatory life sentence if convicted.