Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (5 page)
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Authors: Donald B. Kraybill,Steven M. Nolt,David L. Weaver-Zercher
BOOK: Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy
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CHAPTER TWO
The Shooting
This was our 9/11.
—AMISH LEADER
T
he cloudless skies on Monday, October 2, 2006, reminded some Nickel Mines residents of the blue skies of September 11, 2001. The shock and trauma of the tragedy brought comparisons too. “I will never forget where I was, what I was doing, and who told me first about the shooting,” said one Amish father.
he cloudless skies on Monday, October 2, 2006, reminded some Nickel Mines residents of the blue skies of September 11, 2001. The shock and trauma of the tragedy brought comparisons too. “I will never forget where I was, what I was doing, and who told me first about the shooting,” said one Amish father.
Fall is a festive time for the Amish of Lancaster County because dozens of weddings take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays during that season. By early October, children are counting the days until their siblings or cousins will marry. Amish weddings are happy occasions stretching from early morning until late evening, with three to four hundred friends gathering at the bride’s home. It’s not uncommon for an Amish person to receive invitations to a half dozen weddings in a single fall season. Those invited to multiple weddings on the same day circulate from one celebration to another.
The fall harvest in Nickel Mines was almost finished. Tobacco was already turning tan in the drying sheds and the last cutting of alfalfa would soon be baled into hay for winter feeding. Chopped green corn, blown into sixty-foot-high silos, was fermenting into sweet-smelling silage for cattle feed. Horse-pulled corn pickers, powered by gasoline engines, would soon be husking yellow ears of corn and dropping them onto wagons that would haul them to storage bins near Amish barns.
Hunting season was just around the corner. In late November, many Amish men would climb into vans driven by English people and head to hunting cabins in northern Pennsylvania. Each of them hoped to bag a white-tailed deer at their favorite mountain site. Some diehard hunters would go to Maryland or West Virginia in search of a white-tailed trophy. Twelve-year-old sons eagerly awaited the rite of passage when they would join their fathers in the woods for the first time.
The Nickel Mines Amish who operate stands at farmers markets in Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey were beginning to stock up on meats, cheeses, and other deli items for the holiday season. The brisk air and clear October sky usually heralded a season of celebration and plenty among the Amish of Nickel Mines. This autumn, however, would be different.
At about 3:00 on Monday morning, thirty-two-year-old Charles Carl Roberts IV parked his eighteen-wheel milk truck in the parking lot of the Nickel Mines Auction. He jumped into his small pickup and drove a mile and a half down the road to his home in Georgetown to catch some sleep before sunrise. His work day had begun at 6:00 the night before when he had begun making the rounds with his tank truck to local Amish and English farms. After pumping the milk from the stainless steel tank at each farm into his truck, he hauled his fifty-thousand-pound load to a regional processing plant before heading back to the auction house and then home to bed.
The trucking job suited Roberts’s introverted personality because he could work alone most of the day. He spoke only if someone addressed him first, and his answers were typically short. He had worked as a carpenter before learning the trucking trade from his father-in-law. On occasion little things would agitate him. One farmer reportedly kept his children out of the milk house while Roberts pumped the milk because Roberts swore a lot and seemed frustrated. Other stories also bespoke a troubled soul beneath the shy surface. Coworkers at the processing plant noticed, however, that he seemed friendlier and more relaxed the last week of September, as though something had settled in his mind.
By 7:30 on Monday morning, twenty-six children aged six to thirteen were trudging toward the West Nickel Mines School from ten different homes. Some walked along the road while others took their favorite shortcuts across fields, carrying their red and blue plastic lunch pails and colorful small coolers. They chattered and teased each other along the way. The ones arriving early played briefly in the schoolyard until the school bell called them inside.
Emma, their twenty-year-old teacher, with two years of experience, knew all her students and their parents quite well. She lived less than two miles from the school and her pupils lived within walking distance. Informal visits between parents and teacher, at school and in homes, happen frequently in Amish life. Four special guests had arrived that day—Emma’s mother, her sister, and two of her sisters-in-law. One of the young women was nearly eight months pregnant; another had two small children in tow. Hosting familiar visitors without advance notice is a common practice in small, family-oriented Amish schools.
The walls of Amish schools are typically covered with colorful student artwork, samples of homework, homemade posters, and lesson themes prepared by the teacher. The West Nickel Mines School was no exception. Students’ drawings and short sayings of Amish wisdom decorated the classroom. A sign on the blackboard read, “Visitors Bubble Up Our Days.” Underneath the sign, a teddy bear was blowing bubbles, and in each bubble was written the name of a school visitor. An acronym posted in many Amish schools is
JOY
—
J
esus first,
O
thers next,
Y
ourself last.
JOY
—
J
esus first,
O
thers next,
Y
ourself last.
Emma called the children to order and welcomed her special guests. She began the day by reading a Bible passage in German, because later she would be teaching German to some of the grades. In Amish schools, the lessons, the Bible readings, and the Lord’s Prayer are typically spoken in English, but on this day the students used German for the Bible reading and prayer. Emma read from Acts 4, in which the biblical writer Luke describes the early church in Jerusalem: They “were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all” (Acts 4:32-33).
Following the reading, the children stood and repeated the Lord’s Prayer in German. It came easily to them because they had memorized it in both German and English before they turned five.
After saying the Lord’s Prayer but before beginning their lessons, the children sang three songs, two in German and one in English. One of the German songs, “Bedenke Mensch das Ende” (“Consider, Man, the End”), warns of the final judgment, when “each one will have his turn and receive his reward according to what he has done.” The words are sometimes read at Amish funerals. The children sang them to the tune of the Christian gospel song “Bind Us Together with Love.”
Consider, man! the end,
Consider your death,
Death often comes quickly;
He who today is vigorous and ruddy,
May tomorrow, or sooner,
Have passed away. . . .
The children then sang the seventeenth-century hymn “In der stillen Einsamkeit” (“In Quiet Solitude”) to the tune of “Jesus Loves Me.”
In quiet solitude,
You will find your praise prepared,
Great God hear me,
For my heart seeks you.
You are unchanging,
Never still and yet at rest.
You rule the seasons of the year,
And bring them in at the proper time.
Finally, before turning to their lessons, the scholars sang “Multiply,” a song by gospel singer Dottie Rambo that describes how a barefoot boy gave his bread and fish to Jesus to multiply them for others.
Emma then commenced teaching. Like many Amish teachers, she combined two grades for their lessons. She began recitations with the first and second graders at the blackboard, then worked with the third and fourth graders, and so on. As she taught each cluster, the other students completed their homework, reviewed their lessons, or did independent work. The older boys, eager to play softball in the lovely weather, were soon counting the minutes to recess.
Down the road in Georgetown, after catching a few hours of sleep, Roberts ate breakfast with his wife, Amy, and their three children. Shortly after breakfast, Amy left with their youngest, an eighteen-month-old, for a Moms in Touch prayer group meeting at a local Presbyterian church. Mothers gathered weekly in this group to pray for their children, their teachers, school safety, and other issues of concern in local schools. On this particular morning, a young Amish woman was caring for the preschool children in the church nursery.
Back at his modular home along the main street of Georgetown, Roberts walked his six- and eight-year-old children to the school bus stop and kissed them goodbye at 8:45 A.M. He was scheduled for a routine drug test that morning for his trucking license, but he had other plans. In the house he laid out a suicide note for each family member. Then he carried supplies from his shed to the enclosed back of a pickup truck he had borrowed from his wife’s grandfather, who lived next door. Roberts had been buying supplies over the past week and storing them in the shed beside his home. He still needed some more plastic zip ties—plastic strips that can be pulled tight to hold together a bundle of loose wires—so he drove two miles east to the Amish-owned Valley Hardware store.
With the plastic ties in hand, he now had all the supplies on the list scribbled in the notebook he kept in his tank truck: a 9-mm handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a 30-06 rifle, a stun gun, and six hundred rounds of ammunition. In addition, stowed away in the pickup truck were a tube of lubricating jelly, a hammer, nails, wrenches, binoculars, earplugs, batteries, a flashlight, a candle, tape, two-by-four and two-by-six wood planks, and an extra set of clothing—all the things he would need to barricade himself inside the schoolroom for an extended standoff.
He was on schedule. In fact, he arrived in Nickel Mines a little early; the children were still playing softball during their morning recess. With a few minutes to spare he bought a soda at the vending machine beside the auction house and watched the ball game by the school four hundred yards away. A school trustee, riding in the truck of his English driver, waved to the children as he passed the ball field. A few moments later he saw Roberts by the vending machine but thought nothing of it.
At about 10:15 A.M., after Emma called the children back to their lessons, Roberts drove down White Oak Road to the schoolhouse. He backed his truck into the schoolyard through the open gate of the white board fence, all the way to the small porch at the main entrance. An English neighbor who had just picked up some tools at an Amish rental agency had to wait on the road as Roberts backed his truck into the schoolyard.
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