Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (6 page)

Read Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy Online

Authors: Donald B. Kraybill,Steven M. Nolt,David L. Weaver-Zercher

BOOK: Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy
11.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Hearing the commotion, Emma went to the front door, which was open on the warm day. Turning their heads to see the visitor on the porch, some of the children recognized him as the trucker who picked up milk from their farms. He held a rusty metal object in his hand. Had anyone seen something like this along the road? he asked. Could they help him look? He never looked Emma in the eye but she told him, “Sure, we’ll try.”
 
Roberts went back to his truck and soon returned with a semiautomatic pistol. Entering the schoolhouse, he waved the gun and ordered everyone to lie facedown on the floor at the front of the room, near the blackboard. Seeing the gun and knowing that other adults were in the room, Emma and her mother fled out the side door and ran nearly a quarter of a mile across the fields for help. They arrived at a nearby Amish farm, where the distraught Emma begged for help. At 10:35 A.M., a 911 operator received a call from the farm’s phone shanty: “There’s a guy in the school with a gun.”
 
Back in the schoolhouse, Roberts was agitated. He was surprised to find other adults in the schoolhouse and astonished that the teacher had run for help. He sent one of the boys to bring her back.
 
Roberts tied the feet and legs of some of the girls with zip ties and also bound some of the girls to each other. Several times he promised not to hurt them if they obeyed. The children, raised to trust and obey adults, believed him—at least at first.
 
To conceal his activities, Roberts pulled down the school’s blinds, but one of them snapped back to the top of the window and fell to the floor. In order to reattach it, he climbed atop a desk. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Emma, whose legs were free, heard a woman’s voice say, “Run,” and run she did. No one else heard the voice, and some Amish believe it was the voice of an angel. Next Roberts shoved a ten-year-old boy, who was lying on the floor, out the side door. The pregnant visitor was comforting Naomi Rose, a sobbing seven-year-old, but the gunman soon ordered the adult women to leave. Next he told the boys—eleven of whom had sisters in the schoolhouse—to get out. Stunned and terrified, the boys gathered near the boys’ outhouse to pray. Roberts quickly carried in the rest of his supplies from the truck.
 
Now he was alone with his prey. As he nailed the doors shut to barricade the girls in the dark room, Roberts heard one of them praying. “Would you pray for me?” he asked. One of the girls responded, “Why don’t you pray for us?” He purportedly replied, “I don’t believe in praying.” He had come to molest them, not to pray for them. “If one of you will let me do what I want to, I won’t hurt the rest of you,” he said. One of the younger girls, not understanding his request but hoping to save the others from harm, offered to help. The older girls quickly said in Pennsylvania German,
“Duh’s net! Duh’s net!”
(Don’t do it! Don’t do it!)
 
At one moment in the unfolding tragedy, Roberts mumbled something about giving up and even walked toward the door, according to one of the survivors. For some reason, however, he returned to his plan, telling the girls that he was sorry he had to “do this.” According to the survivors, he said, “I’m angry at God and I need to punish some Christian girls to get even with Him.”
 
At 10:44 A.M., just nine minutes after the 911 call from the phone shanty, three state troopers arrived at the school. They found the doors locked and the blinds pulled. Seven more officers arrived shortly thereafter and quickly surrounded the schoolhouse. A police negotiator, using the bullhorn on his cruiser, tried to contact Roberts, asking him numerous times to put down his gun.
 
During the standoff, Roberts called his wife on his cell phone to say he was not coming home and that he had left notes for everyone. He was angry at God, he said, for the death of their firstborn daughter, Elise, who had lived for only twenty minutes after her birth nine years earlier. In the note to his wife Roberts had written, “I’m not worthy of you, you are the perfect wife, you deserve so much better. . . . I’m filled with so much hate towards myself, hate towards God, and an unimaginable emptiness. It seems like every time we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn’t here to share it with us and I go right back to anger.”
 
Roberts grew even more agitated when he realized that the police had arrived and his plan to molest the girls had failed. At 10:55 A.M. he called 911: “I just took ten girls hostage and I want everybody off the property or else. . . . Right now, or they’re dead in two seconds . . . two seconds, that’s it!”
 
Roberts then turned to the girls: “I’m going to make you pay for my daughter.” Marian, one of two thirteen-year-olds in the room, quickly assumed leadership of the younger girls, doing everything she could to help protect them. Realizing he planned to kill them, she said, “Shoot me first,” hoping to save the others and fulfilling her duty to watch over the little ones in her care.
 
At about 11:05 A.M. the police heard three shotgun blasts followed by rapid-fire pistol shots. A shotgun blast, fired through the window by the main door, narrowly missed several officers. Troopers rushed the building, smashing windows with batons and shields. The killer turned the pistol on himself and fell to the floor as troopers broke through the windows. In execution style, he had gunned down the lineup of girls on the floor. Five would die. The other five, critically injured, had survived by rolling around and burying their heads in their arms.
 
Police dispatchers radioed a “mass casualty,” and before long the site was flooded with a hundred state and local police, twenty ambulance crews, and trucks from five fire companies. The Lancaster County coroner who arrived on the scene called it “blood, glass, trash, chaos.” It was impossible to fit ten stretchers inside the schoolhouse, so troopers covered the children and carried them outside, where they tried to control the bleeding until ambulance crews could transport them away. Naomi Rose died in a trooper’s arms outside the school.
 
The view could hardly have been more surreal: the serene pasture surrounding the schoolhouse looked like a combat zone. Five medevac helicopters arrived as four police helicopters and an airplane patrolled the skies. At one point, as the media converged on the site, eleven helicopters and several airplanes flew overhead until the police declared a no-fly zone above the school.
 
A medevac helicopter lifted the first child skyward at 11:21 A.M., just eleven minutes after troopers reported the mass casualty alert. It headed northwest toward Penn State Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Amish farmers in northern Lancaster County, who had already heard of the shooting, saw the helicopter carrying one of their own as it flew over their farms. Other helicopters flew to hospitals in Lancaster, Philadelphia, and Reading. One child was flown to Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware.
 
Parents, surrounded by family and neighbors, stood at a distance, watching the horrific scene without knowing the conditions of their daughters. Eventually about one hundred family members and friends gathered at a nearby Amish farm—the same one the teacher and her mother had run to for help—to console one another and wait for news. For several hours it remained unclear who was dead and who was alive. The children carried no identification, and with similar dress and many head injuries it wasn’t clear who had gone to which hospital. Photos taken at the hospitals were e-mailed back to a mobile command center so the parents could learn about the status and location of their children.
 
Later in the day, word of the deadly toll began to spread. In addition to Naomi Rose, two others had died at the schoolhouse: thirteen-year-old Marian, who had offered to be shot first, and twelve-year-old Anna Mae. Indicative of the confusion that reigned that day, Anna Mae’s father had been driven to Christiana Hospital in Delaware expecting to see her, only to find a child from another Amish family. It wasn’t until 8:30 that evening that Anna Mae’s mother learned that she had died in the schoolhouse and concluded, “Now we know where she is [in heaven].”
 
One family lost two daughters. Eight-year-old Mary Liz, who had been taken to Christiana Hospital, died in her mother’s arms shortly after midnight. Her parents were then driven seventy miles northwest to Hershey Medical Center. There, at 4:30 A.M., Lena, Mary Liz’s seven-year-old sister, also died in her mother’s arms.
 
Within sixteen hours of the shooting, five of the girls were “safe in the arms of Jesus,” as Amish parents repeated many times. Five others, critically injured, struggled for their lives. An Amish woman in Iowa spoke for hundreds of Amish people: “My mind went to the following song many times: ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus / Safe on his gentle breast / There by His love o’er shaded / Sweetly my soul shall rest.’”
 
The five girls had joined the sixteenth-century martyrs of the Amish faith. The old martyr stories are recorded in a thousand-page book,
The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians,
known simply as
Martyrs Mirror.
Amish ministers often cite this massive tome in their sermons. Beheaded, burned at the stake, and tortured for their faith, the martyrs died because they were considered heretics during the Protestant Reformation. Nearly five hundred years later, the five girls at the Nickel Mines School died quicker deaths, although not directly for their faith. Still, in the minds of many Amish people, they were martyrs. “They were willing to die, and that makes them martyrs,” said one Amish mother. “The oldest one said, ‘Shoot me first.’”
 
Perhaps it was the stories of the martyrs in her people’s history that imbued the oldest girl with such courage on that terrifying day. The stories and songs of the faith that she had learned will certainly be passed down to generations after hers. And for the Amish survivors of Nickel Mines, the song she and her classmates had sung that morning will carry a sad and profound resonance for years to come:
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.
 
 
 
CHAPTER THREE
 
The Aftermath
 
We were all Amish this week.
—NICKEL MINES AMISH MAN
 
 
 
 
 
T
he news of the Nickel Mines massacre spread quickly across the nation and around the world. Not only was the cold-blooded violence awful in its scope, but it had struck a people and a place that many imagined was immune from such terror.
 
As satellite dishes beamed the story around the world, even people who knew little or nothing of the Amish found themselves overcome with sadness. At several Amish farmers markets in the Baltimore-Washington area, outsiders brought flowers and knelt to pray in front of Amish deli stands. At several stands, non-Amish people set up collection boxes for cash donations. “People didn’t know what to say to us,” recalled an Amish man who runs a farmers market in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. “There were cloudy eyes and tears. ‘What can we do?’ they asked.”
 
In fact, people did many things. Grief counselors from the Lancaster County Emergency Management Agency arrived at the Bart Township firehouse early Monday afternoon, only hours after the shooting. They remained busy throughout the week, helping Amish and English alike to process the terror and pain. Other mental health professionals provided counseling for several weeks thereafter, serving anyone in need, including panic-stricken Amish children. “They did a great job,” said an Amish fire official. “They told us that things will never be the same again, that we must find ‘a new normal.’” He kept repeating the phrase as we talked: “a new normal, a new normal.” The expression was clearly helping him get his bearings in the aftermath of the tragedy.
 
The Bart firehouse soon became the command center for police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, and hundreds of volunteers who converged on the village of Georgetown. Sixty-nine fire companies from other areas provided support throughout the week. Fire company personnel, in cooperation with the police, managed the deluge of media vehicles and coordinated the four Amish funeral processions, which plodded through Georgetown a few days after the shooting. Fire company volunteers and neighbors served thousands of meals at the firehouse, feeding some five hundred people a day for most of the week. Local stores contributed food and drinks for the hungry volunteers.
 
The Bart Post Office received thousands of cards, letters, checks, and gifts from around the world. Some letters arrived with only a simple address: “Amish Families of Nickel Mines, USA.” For four weeks, volunteers came to the firehouse five days a week and sorted the mail into large plastic tubs. Each tub had a label: the name of a particular Amish family, “the Roberts family,” or “the Amish.” One Amish family received about twenty-five hundred letters. By mid-November, as the mail began to dwindle, the sorters came in only three days a week. An entire office at the firehouse overflowed with teddy bears—hundreds more than the surviving children could use. The extra teddy bears and other toys eventually found their way to children in other Amish schools.

Other books

Emma's Treasures by Rebecca Joyce
The Book of Bad Things by Dan Poblocki
The Pulse by Shoshanna Evers
Livvie Owen Lived Here by Sarah Dooley
Calling the Shots by Annie Dalton