If I Don’t Make It, I Love You

ON A COLD and rainy October morning in 2018, my husband, a native Pennsylvanian familiar with Amish society, and I drove the more than three hours from Jersey City, New Jersey to Paradise, Pennsylvania, to meet with an Amish father, Aaron, whose son survived the West Nickel Mines shooting on October 2, 2006. After spending weeks trying to connect with these families, I was finally in. I was nervous the whole ride there, reminding myself this isn’t just a different culture. It’s an entirely different society, and one I was never exposed to except through the occasional farmer’s market.

This shooting haunted me. I reviewed the events of the day on the drive there: October 2, 2006, Charles “Charlie” Roberts IV, a milk truck driver who served Amish farms in the Nickel Mines area, filled his pickup truck with building supplies and drove to the nearby West Nickel Mines one-room schoolhouse where he ordered all the boys to leave. He barricaded the doors and bound the remaining girls. Their teacher, Emma Mae Zook, managed to escape and run to a nearby farm for help. Roberts shot eight out of ten girls, ages six through thirteen, killing five, before committing suicide in the schoolhouse. The shooting is known by the Amish as The Happening.

When we arrived at Aaron’s home, both him and his wife were warm and welcoming. They had a small pug mix named Coca-Cola, who growled and barked at us. Aaron’s wife shooed the pup away. We all sat around their table, Coca-Cola placemats under our elbows. Aaron began to tell me the story of his son. How he was one of the boys inside the one-room schoolhouse. Roberts eventually killed himself as more authorities moved in on him.

Aaron continued to tell me about his son who struggled with anorexia after the shooting. He and his wife told us about their son’s slow decline from more than 180 pounds to less than 100, perhaps a symptom of survivor’s guilt. He said you have to imagine being in a class of ten and now in a class of two and what that does to you. This was insight I never thought about. I’d always been in a large class, and never considered the devastating impact of a shooting on a smaller school class.

We also spoke about the young girls injured that day. He told me about their progress, some of which now married and raising their own children. While survivors like Sarah Ann Stoltzfus still have some vision impairment, Barbie Fisher and Esther King have healed considerably. But the youngest victim, Rosanna King, who originally had not been expected to survive because of severe brain trauma, does not walk or talk. Aaron confirmed for me that she is still in a wheelchair, but has been said to smile at family and friends.

As the girls healed, the reverberation of the shooting echoed throughout the Amish community. Aaron told me of Amish tours that made their way from the midwest to Paradise to visit the site of the shooting. They came by the busload, he said. West Nickel became an attraction. All they wanted to hear about was what happened.

Together we visited the site of the five pear trees that were planted for each of the dead girls. You would never know that what these are for, he added as we drove past. And when I asked him to talk more about the forgiveness toward the shooter and his family, a gesture that was hard for the English-speaking world to understand, he said to me under the dim dining room light, I don’t know if we would’ve felt the same way if he survived. This statement was shocking considering the plethora of articles and books written on how the Amish forgave Roberts and his family, even setting up a fund for his widow to cover the costs of his funeral.

After my husband and I left their house, I saw Amye had messaged me about another shooting that took place the same day at a Pittsburgh synagogue, which I later learned was at the Tree of Life. Here I was talking to a family whose son survived a shooting at the same time another shooting was unfolding. And when I got inside the car, I started to cry. My husband cried. We held each other and cried. I thought how vital this project was in order to expose a nation to the pain endured by survivors of gun violence, a pain closer than we can often sense.

LOREN KLEINMAN, EDITOR

DECEMBER 2018

The following students were shot and killed at
West Nickel Mines School:

Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7

Marian Stoltzfus Fisher, 13

Lena Zook Miller, 8

Mary Liz Miller, 7

Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12

GSW’S AND THE MAKING OF
A TRAUMA SURGEON

By A. Reema Kar, M.D.

A. Reema Kar was a medical student on the day of the shooting at the Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. Her experiences that day led her to pursue a career in trauma surgery. She is currently an assistant professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Twelve years ago, I was a twenty-four-year-old medical student at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania. After completing two years of intense study in lectures and labs, I was assigned to the Pediatric ICU (PICU) during my first inpatient clinical rotation. I was quite eager to start finally taking care of patients, but I had no idea what awaited me on that particular day.

For me, and the entire team in the PICU, the morning of October 2, 2006, started like every other morning. I scrambled to get to the hospital by 6:30 a.m. to review the charts and labs on my patient, and discuss the overnight events with the resident and fellow who were on call the previous night. We continued through our usual routine of ICU rounds, discussing every vital sign and lab value, poring over chest X-rays,, and examining babies connected to ventilators. By around 11:30 a.m., we had nearly finished, and were ready for our ritual post-rounds coffee break. That’s when all of our pagers went off at once. The green digital display read, “Multiple pediatric GSW’s.” “GSW,” the medical slang for gunshot wound, was an abbreviation I had only seen and heard on TV . . . until then. As the PICU team stared at each other in disbelief, a subtle but urgent fear crept into our minds. Children had been shot? In this quiet, sleepy corner of Pennsylvania we liked to call “The Sweetest Place on Earth”?

What we didn’t know yet was that less than fifty miles away from where we stood, a man had entered a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and shot ten Amish girls, fatally wounding some of them. The director of the Pediatric ICU answered the phone ringing at the nurses’ station. He confirmed that an unknown number of victims from a school shooting were en route to our hospital. Immediately, the PICU team sprang to action, mobilizing every resource at their disposal to prepare for a potential mass casualty event.

Victims from the shooting were flown to several trauma centers in the surrounding counties. Three of the Amish girls were wheeled into our Emergency Department at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center that afternoon. Emergency medicine doctors, anesthesiologists, pediatric intensivists, and trauma surgeons lined the hallway as the EMS teams rolled the stretchers into the ER. I stood aside, waiting for instructions, letting the surgeons and doctors control the chaos. In a blur of minutes that felt like hours, the various teams rushed to secure airways, stabilize vital signs, and care for bleeding gunshot wounds. As a young medical student, there was little I could actually do. I simply did not have the training to help. It felt as though the world was spinning around me, but that I had stopped, suspended in time in the midst of that unthinkable tragedy, utterly powerless to do anything.

When the patients, the three little Amish girls, were rolled up to the PICU, I waited at their bedsides as the nurses and doctors cleaned and examined bullet wounds. I stared, transfixed, at beeping ventilators and blinking monitors, afraid to look away for fear that all those noises and signs of life may stop if I did not keep watching. Neurosurgeons explained to us that transcranial gunshot wounds, bullets that travel across both sides of the brain, cause irreversible damage that is rarely survivable. I struggled to comprehend what that meant. It was absolutely unthinkable that these little girls were slowly dying in front of me.

October 2, 2006, changed my life. The images of pigtailed little girls in flowery dresses with grass-stained bare feet, lying in hospital beds and bleeding from bullet holes has never left my mind. In the days that followed, I visited the surviving patients in the PICU, and spent time with the Amish families in the ICU waiting room. I didn’t speak Pennsylvania German, but I could play with the siblings of the victims while their parents visited their critically injured children. I could smile and give hugs, even though I was breaking on the inside. One of our patients died in the hospital. We later learned that her sister died at another trauma center from similar injuries. Our second patient suffered devastating head injuries, but she was stable enough to go home with her family. The PICU team did not expect her to survive. The last little girl recovered from her bodily wounds, but I often wonder how well a child can truly heal after such a tragedy.

I certainly could not forget, much less heal. For days, I could not eat or sleep. I could not focus on lectures and reading assignments for the rest of my Pediatrics clerkship. I could not stop seeing those girls in my mind. I felt numb and trapped, reliving that nightmare. I had never been so close to such violence, and I struggled to understand my purpose as a future physician in such a shocking context. I promised myself that day that I would never feel so helpless again. I vowed to enter a field of medicine in which I could do something in the face of such chaos. I promised to learn how to intervene in a crisis, to really help patients with overwhelming injuries, and hopefully, someday, to save lives.

Years later, I was completing my residency in general surgery, preparing for a career in trauma surgery and surgical critical care. I probably never would have become a surgeon if it were not for those little Amish girls. I know that I was meant to be in that PICU in Hershey that morning, and to see and experience what others only watched on their television screens. The events of that day touched me in a way that nothing else before or since has done. Walking home that night from the PICU, I thought it would be the most horrific thing I ever witnessed. But it wasn’t. After Nickel Mines, there was Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and Aurora, Colorado.

Six years ago, on December 14, 2012, I realized it had happened again. My throat tightened, my stomach turned, and goosebumps covered my skin as I watched, glued to the television news coverage with the other nurses and residents. Children had been shot. Again. At an elementary school. Again. This time, in Newtown, Connecticut. That’s when I thought something would change. The world would not stand idly by as first-graders were murdered in their classrooms. Right?

But then there was Charleston, San Bernadino, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Parkland. The sheer numbers were incomprehensible. One gunshot victim is a challenge. Two are taxing. Three are overwhelming. Fifty-nine? Incapacitating. Five hundred? Unfathomable. Inhuman. I remember wondering, will something change now? Is this enough? When will this no longer be acceptable to modern society? How many lives must be lost to realize what one is worth?

My experiences with those Amish children set me on a very specific path. I became a trauma surgeon after seeing what gun violence can do to people and families. I became a trauma surgeon because I wanted to be able to do the most when the situation was the worst. I run toward the crisis, not away from it because I have made it my life’s work to care for patients who are the victims of violent tragedies. Despite all of that, I look forward to the day that I do not have to treat multiple victims from a mass shooting. After training for nearly a decade to understand and assess what happens to the body when bullets blast through it, I hope I never have to see the level of death and devastation I saw in the PICU after the shooting at the Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines.

It takes seconds for a single bullet to carve a path of destruction. It can take me hours in the OR to find and fix the injuries, if I even can. There are days when everything I know how to do as a trauma surgeon is not enough to save a person’s life. There are times when all the might of modern medicine is no match for simple human physiology. There are nights I spend in the hospital wondering why this cycle never ends.

Even though I go to work every day waiting for injured patients to arrive, seeing the blinking green “GSW” on my pager screen still fills me with dread because I have witnessed the horror of a mass shooting. I have left the hospital covered in a teenager’s blood and a mother’s tears. I have told a father that his new baby is safe and healthy in the NICU, but her mother may never wake up from the coma. I have watched families break down at the bedside in the ICU over loved ones lost forever. I know what it’s like to go from one patient to the next, triaging the worst injuries to the OR first, deciding who might live and who likely won’t. After every wound is stitched and every bullet hole bandaged, the trauma continues to spread like ripples in a pond. Every person on the wrong side of a bullet is someone’s son or sister, father, or friend. As I know from personal experience, bullets do not need to pierce the skin to leave permanent wounds. Often, it is the invisible scar that is the deepest.

When will it be enough?

PAINTING THE AMISH

By Bruce Becker

Bruce Becker is an artist living in Pennsylvania. His book, Kindness and Compassion, about the aftermath of the West Nickel Mines shooting, conveys the unique closeness Bruce had with the Amish during that tragic time.

As the Nickel Mines shooting was unfolding, I was painting an Amish school bell in my studio. I purchased the bell the day before from an Amish woman, and knew it would be the subject of my next painting. It was the first Amish subject I ever painted. I considered the fact I was painting the bell at the same time of the shooting a coincidence. And as a result, I felt compelled to help in some way.

While the shooting was considered a tragedy for the Amish, they forgave the shooter. No matter the circumstances, the Amish always react with kindness and compassion. And so Kindness and Compassion became the title of the bell painting, and with the blessing and approval of the Amish community, I gave public talks about the meaning behind the painting. I made prints of the painting that raised money and awareness for the Amish. And at the request of the Amish, I wound up writing a book about my experiences with them in the aftermath of the shooting.

My involvement with the Amish continues today, twelve years after the tragedy. My interactions with this event were one of a participant-observer. As an artist, I’m connected to the subject through observation. People who know my artwork, understand it represents and promotes beauty and positivity. The message from the Amish was very much the same. One of the father’s from the community said my work was “[shedding] a ray of light in a time of darkness.” He must’ve been right. Because that message drew me into the lives of people worldwide. The message reverberated around the world, and I went from from sitting in the kitchens of the Amish families discussing the loss of their children to coming home to find reporters on my porch waiting for me. I was living a life of dichotomy: back and forth from the Amish world to the English world. The Amish wanting me to tell their story and the English wanting to hear it, always in awe of their faith-based reaction.

Through it all, I was aware I hadn’t suffered the devastating loss and horror directly myself. Yet every day I visited the community, I was physically in the places and with the people who had experienced such devastation. I was the messenger of this unique humanitarian gesture of the Amish. Many times I made this very clear to those I spoke to. And to this day I remain friends with many of the Amish, and I’m welcome in their community.

FORGIVENESS IS A GIFT

By Marie Monville

Marie Monville is the author of One Light Still Shines: My Life beyond the Shadow of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting. Monville is the widow of Charles Roberts, the gunman of the West Nickel Mines School shooting.

Growing up in conservative Lancaster County, my first thoughts on forgiveness came from both my family and culture. I had a simplistic view, which suggested that someone who’d hurt me would recognize the pain they caused and want to make amends. If I were the one who caused the pain, I’d want to do the same. We’d exchange meaningful words and that would be the end of it. But as an adult, I know this type of forgiveness rarely works that way. Sometimes the person responsible doesn’t realize the pain they’ve caused others. Sometimes they don’t care.

Forgiveness isn’t simple. It’s a choice. It’s born of pain and loss. On the surface, it seems to cost everything, giving up our right to hang onto suffering. But I’ve learned it’s not so much about what I feel like I’m giving up. Instead, it’s about what I receive. Letting go of the agony and embracing the freedom of forgiveness is a gift. Let me explain.

One the afternoon of October 2, 2006, a group of Amish men walked toward my parents’ home. When I saw them from the window, apprehension filled my heart and thoughts raced through my mind: What questions might they ask? What demands might they make? And rightly so. I had nothing of seeming value to give in light of all they faced. My father went outside to greet them. I continued to watch from the window, unable to hear their voices, but I saw it all: the way they placed their hands gently on his shoulders, the way they looked him in the eyes, and spoke without evidence of anger or hatred. I watched them hug my father and saw the tears that flowed down each face as they made their way back out the drive.

When my dad came inside, my family and I waited for him to collect himself from the emotion of the moment. He said that they came because they were concerned about my children and me. They wanted us to know they’d forgiven Charlie and extended grace and compassion over our family.

I was stunned. This was not my original thought as they walked toward my parents’ home. They did not come to get anything from me. Instead, they delivered a gift: the forgiveness that found its way deep inside their hearts. The way it changed what they saw when they looked at my family. While everyone else was looking to me to account for Charlie’s choices, the Amish came instead to give me something that freed me from the weight of shame, which threatened to crash into me like a tidal wave.

They helped me see that forgiveness is a choice we make to free ourselves from the weight of pain and its ability to destroy our lives. My choice to forgive Charlie, their choice to forgive Charlie, was not about Charlie. This choice had nothing to do with him. Their choice was about them, and my choice was about me. It was a choice to exhale pain, inhale healing. A choice to let go of my questions, my grief, my agony—the crushing weight that threatened to suffocate my soul. But it wasn’t instantaneous. Forgiveness is messy, it’s inconvenient, but it’s worth it. In time, forgiveness went deep and changed everything about the way I saw my circumstances and myself. Forgiveness freed me to live above circumstances, instead of feeling constantly submerged by the pain of Charlie’s choices. It enabled me to find the healing I desperately needed if I wanted to lead my kids (and myself) into a future of thriving, not just surviving.

Please hear me on this, extending forgiveness doesn’t mean that someone is no longer responsible for his or her actions, and it does not diminish the aftermath of their choices. It just means that we refuse to allow them/their choices to have control over our lives. I wasn’t going to allow Charlie’s decisions to dictate my life’s outcome. Forgiveness enabled me to live in opposition to it. It’s given me the space to lead my life and parent my kids with love, to look for possibility in the world around us, and to walk in redemption. What initially seemed to cost me everything has instead, given me the greatest gifts.