Amish Grace

The 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—Jesus first, Others next, Yourself 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.”

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.

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.