Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (8 page)

On Saturday, the family and friends of Charles Carl Roberts IV gathered for his burial. Following a private service at a local funeral home, Roberts’s body was taken to the cemetery of the Georgetown United Methodist Church, a short three hundred yards from his home. There he was laid to rest beside the pink, heart-shaped gravestone of his infant daughter, Elise, whose death nine years earlier had tormented him for so long.

With the girls and their killer now buried, questions about the reason for Roberts’s rampage resurfaced. “We all keep asking why,” said Roberts’s grandfather-in-law, who had lived next door to him. “Everyone had a good word for Charlie, but he just lost his mind.” The brutal violence did not fit with what he knew about Roberts’s care for his children. Moreover, as far as he knew, the gunman “had no bad feelings against the Amish.” The only thing he could tie to Roberts’s behavior was his intense reserve. “He was very quiet. He would stand here in the driveway and throw the ball to the dog, but not say anything, not even to me. To get a conversation going, you had to start it.”

A possible explanation for his outburst came from the killer himself. When Roberts called his wife from the schoolhouse, he said he was plagued by memories of having molested two family members twenty years earlier. But this explanation, like every other, seemed insufficient to explain the rampage. In addition, the family members he referred to had no recollections of abuse.

One week to the day after the shooting, school classes for the surviving Amish children resumed in a garage on a nearby Amish property. To prepare for the move to the new location, parents, friends, and the surviving boys returned to the old schoolhouse in rented vans to retrieve their remaining books and supplies. Emergency workers had already cleaned up the blood and broken glass that had littered the floor. When the boys entered the building they went to the front, knelt down where the girls had been bound together, and poked their fingers through the bullet holes in the floor. Then they went to their desks to gather up their supplies. The parents searched the desks of their daughters to retrieve artwork, pencils, and any memorabilia they could find. The blackboard was taken down and, with its chalk lessons still intact, loaded into a waiting van.

Before they left the school, one of the parents asked an Amish bishop to say a prayer. “He wished us all God’s richest blessings and talked about how the Lord works in everything. Tears were flowing again, but these were tears of peace,” recalled an Amish witness. The bishop thanked the boys for showing the courage to return to the school and go through their desks; he then prayed the Lord’s Prayer. “It was such a sacred moment, such a sacred place,” said one Amish person. “I could just feel God’s power. There was lots of crying, and it was very, very sad, but on the other hand there was peace, peace. God’s presence was so real I could almost touch it.”

As they prepared to leave, the boys gathered around the rope of the school bell. They were eager to pull it at exactly 10:45 A.M., when churches across Lancaster County would ring their bells to mark the passing of the first week since the tragedy. A state policeman who was guarding the schoolhouse gave a nod at the exact time. With so many hands pulling so hard, the bell rang just once and then got stuck. Some of the boys scampered onto the roof and continued to ring it from up there.

Returning to the school was a healing experience, but it could not alter the fact that things had changed. Before leaving their old schoolyard, the boys began planning the location of the ball diamond they would create at the temporary school down the road. The West Nickel Mines School had two ball fields, so all of the children could play at the same time. Now it dawned on the boys that they would need only one, because ten of their classmates were missing.

One person who wasn’t missing, however, was their teacher. When the students reassembled in their makeshift classroom, Emma was there to meet them and resume her teaching duties. It would be best for her and for her scholars, she reasoned, if she were there to help them find their “new normal.”

Within days of the shooting, word had spread among the media that the Amish might raze the old school building. “Why would they do that?” asked one reporter. “Is it part of a religious ritual of purification?” The easy answer was no: the Amish do not have purification rituals. They simply did not want their children to be reminded of the terror of that hour, day after day, season after season, as they sat in a room where five of their peers had died and another five were wounded. The Amish were also concerned about the possibility that thousands of tourists would converge on White Oak Road to see the now historic site. “We want to move on,” said an Amish farmer. “The community doesn’t want all the publicity and all the tourists that would come to Nickel Mines if the school remained standing.” In short, common sense dictated demolition.

At 4:45 A.M. on October 12, ten days after the shooting, the teeth of a huge backhoe bit into the schoolhouse. In fifteen minutes it was rubble. Working in the early dawn under large spotlights, the demolition crew hoped to avoid the media glare. Nevertheless, a few photographers and a handful of Amish turned out to witness the destruction of this peculiar site of death.

Several weeks after the shooting, state police officers and Amish families gathered in the Bart firehouse on a Friday evening. The gathering was marked by the appearance of three of the surviving girls, who had recently returned home from the hospital. The girls recognized the troopers who had rescued them and rushed over to talk to them. “It was very emotional. It was something that’s hard to put into words—how the state police put their hearts out on the floor and the Amish did the same,” said the father of one of the survivors. “It was good for both sides. It was comforting for the girls.”

The Amish had only words of praise for the police. “The police were magnificent,” said one Amish shop worker, who added, “I’ll wave at them the next time I see them.” It appeared that many Amish people in Lancaster County had made the same decision. Typically reticent in their interactions with outsiders, some Amish people began lifting their hands in greeting as they passed officers on the road. As members of “another kingdom,” the Amish had gained a new respect for the agents of the state, who had guarded their community and given them space to grieve after their own September 11.

Reporters continued to wonder if the shooting would bring changes in Amish schools, especially in the area of safety.The Amish wondered the same thing. On October 10, eight days after the shooting, Amish leaders held a meeting at an Amish home to discuss the safety questions that many people, both Amish and English, had been asking for a week. Should electronic alarms be installed? What about cell phones programmed to call 911?

The leaders decided that electronic forms of protection would probably not prevent future shootings and, according to one elder, could even weaken “our trust in God, losing His blessing on our schools.” Mechanical enhancements gained greater favor than electronic ones: installation of locks on schoolhouse doors, panic bars so people could exit but not enter, and sturdy fences with strong locks. Some proposed the use of evacuation drills and others suggested locating schools closer to Amish homes. But these suggestions were simply that: suggestions. In the end, each of the hundreds of small Amish school boards across the country would decide what safety changes, if any, they would implement. Each school board would draw the delicate line between trusting in God or in human devices.

By mid-November, a site had been selected for the new school, which would be built in early 2007. New grass sprouting on the old schoolyard was blending in with the adjoining pasture. The surviving girls were recovering; in fact, three were already back at school. Another, needing constant care, had returned home, and the fifth, still at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, hoped to be home by Christmas. Indeed, she amused many in the Amish community when word got out that she had begged a nurse to wrap her in a big gift box as a present for her parents.

And there was a new Naomi Rose. The twenty-two-year-old pregnant visitor, who had comforted the distraught Naomi Rose before being ordered to leave the schoolhouse, gave her newborn daughter that name eight days later.

The Amish in Nickel Mines were moving on. Though the survivors carried deep scars, both physical and emotional, they were committed to moving on as a community, to caring for each other, and to practicing their faith. With God’s help, they were starting to live “a new normal.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Surprise

You mean some people actually thought we got together to plan forgiveness?

—AMISH GRANDMOTHER

T
he schoolhouse shooting in quiet Amish country shocked the world. Then, with a swiftness that also startled the world, the Nickel Mines Amish forgave the killer and offered grace to his family.

Even as outsiders were responding with compassion for the Amish community in the wake of the shooting, the Amish themselves were doing another kind of work. Softly, subtly, and quietly, they were beginning the difficult task of forgiveness.

The Amish quickly realized that Roberts’s widow and children were also victims of the shooting—victims who had lost not only a husband and father, but also their privacy. Unlike the Amish victims, the Roberts family had to bear the shame of having a loved one inflict such pain on innocent children and families. Within a few hours of the shooting, some Amish people were already reaching out to the killer’s family.

Amos, an Amish minister in one of the nearby church districts, described it to us like this: “Well, there were three of us standing around at the firehouse on Monday evening. We just thought we should go and say something to Amy, Roberts’s widow. So first we went to her house, and no one was there. Then we walked over to her grand-father’s house and no one was there. So we walked over to her father’s house and she, her children, and her parents were there alone. So we just talked with them for about ten minutes to express our sorrow and told them that we didn’t hold anything against them.”

That same evening, several miles away, an Amish man went to see the killer’s father, a retired police officer who provided taxi service for local Amish residents. Dwight Lefever, a spokesperson for the Roberts family, later told the media that an Amish neighbor had come to comfort the family. “He stood there for an hour, and he held that man [Mr. Roberts] in his arms and said, ‘We forgive you.’” In the next days, Roberts’s parents received many visits and calls from other Amish people who also expressed forgiveness and gracious concern.

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