by Jonas Beiler
No pain nor death can enter there
I feel like traveling on.1
In yet another farmhouse just west of the school, six-year-old Rosanna King snapped awake, taking only a moment to gather her senses before jumping out of bed. She loved mornings, loved waking up to a new day, and loved this new thing called school. It was her first year, and she was proving to be a good student even at such a young age.
After her morning routine, she and one of her two brothers ran down the lane where they would sometimes meet up with their friend Esther Rose. Esther was the second oldest girl in the school, and the younger ones looked up to her. A small girl for her age, with glasses, soft brown eyes, and brown hair, Esther knew what it was like to lose someone close—her father had died five years before when a car ran into his horse and buggy. She had two sisters and four brothers, and one of her brothers had been injured in the accident.
The five children often met at the end of the lane and walked toward the school together. The boys would run ahead while Esther and Rosanna walked behind, enjoying the beautiful morning.
Cutting through those autumn fields were three more girls, the Fisher sisters, the last of the eleven girls in that small school: Marian, who at thirteen was the oldest girl in the school and had her own room at home; Barbie, eleven; and Emma, nine, who was usually singing. The three girls also had one older brother and three younger brothers, one of whom joined them on the daily walks to school.
They were walking away from a home that contained four families and included their great-grandmother, their father’s parents, and a widowed aunt with two children. For them, and for all the children on their way to school that morning, family was everything. Family and community. Most Amish in that area rarely travel far from Nickel Mines, except for those who operate farmer’s market stands or go on vacation. They attend church and school and weddings and funerals together, and have for generations.
Sometimes Marian, Barbie, and Emma, along with their younger brother, joined up with the Stoltzfus sisters, Sarah Ann and Anna Mae. Chattering happily about normal, daily events, they would walk toward the school. But on that morning a neighbor saw only Anna Mae and Sarah Ann skipping through the field, arms swinging lunch boxes, dresses dancing. Perhaps Anna Mae still felt somewhat guilty about not having finished the laundry. Maybe eight-year-old Sarah Ann thought about the book she was reading, wondering what would happen next.
From the sky you would have seen them converging on the schoolhouse like tiny rag dolls bouncing toward a gleaming white dollhouse, the morning sun casting shadows and warming the autumn air. These Amish children—the boys in their suspenders and straw hats, the girls in their dresses and hair tied back in tight buns—were a picture from another era, some skipping, some walking slowly. They came from all directions that morning, cutting through the fields or walking the backcountry roads. As they approached the boundary of their schoolhouse, some of them climbed over the fence and some squeezed between the rails, while others, approaching from the road, came through the wide-open front gate.
A small sign just inside the schoolhouse offered this welcome in Pennsylvania Dutch: “Visitors brighten our day.”
Amish windmill
CHAPTER FOUR
Point of No Return
JUST OVER FOUR hours after he went to bed, Charles Roberts woke up. The day had finally arrived. We will never know how he felt as the sun rose, whether or not any doubt crept into his mind about his plan. He woke up just after seven thirty that morning and helped his wife get their two oldest children ready for school.
Charles pulled on some jeans, a T-shirt, and a button-down shirt. A baseball cap covered his short brown hair. At six-two and two hundred pounds, he was a big man. His face had a soft look to it, almost boyish.
On the surface, the morning went along in the usual fashion as the family prepared for the day. Charles rubbed the sleep from his eyes, helped feed the kids and get them out the door. About an hour later he was helping them onto the bus.
Then a strange thing happened: Charles called his children back off the bus. He squatted down beside them as they came down the bus’s high steps. They probably wondered what was wrong, because he had never done that before. But he just hugged them again, straightened their clothes, mussed their hair.
“I love you,” he said before ushering them back onto the bus.
The bus pulled away, heavy and slow, into the bright morning.
Back at the house, Charles’s wife, Marie, didn’t see the strange farewell—she was just trying to get out the door to her usual Monday morning prayer meeting. Another quick good-bye, another “I love you.” Then she left, assuming her husband would be leaving soon for the drug test he had to take on a regular basis for his job. He was not a drug user, but the test was required to keep his commercial driver’s license. It would be the first test he ever missed.
The morning was just beginning to burst in all its fall splendor as the sun shone over the surrounding trees and fields. If there was ever a time that Charles would have reconsidered his plans for that day, and evidence points to at least one such time, surely this would have been one. His children were safely off to school and he had just looked into their faces and told them he loved them. The routine beginnings of another week—many a Sunday evening plan has melted away in the mundane progressions of a Monday morning. Even though he had carefully planned what he was about to do, he had yet to commit a crime. He could return the lumber and other supplies he had bought to help him carry out his plan, and everything would be fine.
But he did not change his mind. No one is sure exactly when he wrote the notes to his family that were found later. Perhaps he went back into his house and wrote them after Marie and the kids had left. The writing was in a slanting cursive, with a few words scribbled out and certain letters blacker than others from corrections. But for those who would later try to understand why he would do what he did, this note offered a clue:
I don’t know how you put up with me all those years. I am not worthy of you, you are the perfect wife you deserve so much better. We had so many good memories together as well as the tragedy with Elise. It changed my life forever I haven’t been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself, hate towards God, and 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.1
Very few who came in contact with Charles would have had the first impression that he was angry or bitter. While he occasionally exhibited a quick temper, he did not appear to be a hateful man. Yet in his note to his wife it was this deep-seated frustration, hate, and regret, apparently kept hidden for all these years, that rose to the surface.
After the shooting, Marie described Charles as a loving husband and father in a statement released to the press:
The man that did this today was not the Charlie I’ve been married to for almost ten years. My husband was loving, supportive, thoughtful, all the things you would always want, and more. He was an exceptional father, he took the kids to soccer practice and games, played ball in the back yard, took our seven-year-old daughter shopping. He never said no when I asked him to change a diaper. Our hearts are broken, our lives are shattered, and we grieve for the innocence and lives that were lost today. Above all, please pray.2
If Charlie did reconsider his plans, he quickly worked through his doubts and decided to continue. As soon as Marie left the house, Charlie went straight over to his neighbor’s place to borrow his GMC pickup truck. He told the neighbor he needed to haul some lumber.
Once the truck was parked in his own driveway, Charlie began loading it with supplies he had purchased during the previous weeks from the local hardware store, Valley Hardware. It was the type of place where the employees knew or recognized just about every customer. The walls and shelves were lined with miscellaneous hardware items hanging on hooks or piled in bins: screws, hinges, tools, equipment
. On a Tuesday in late September, only a week or so prior, Charlie had purchased two packages of thin plastic ties from Valley Hardware. A young Amish girl had helped him with his purchase. Two days later he would buy a stun gun from a local gun shop for thirty-five dollars.
He had hidden everything in a small storage shed attached to his house. On the morning of October 2, after Marie left the house, he packed those items into the covered bed of the borrowed pickup and proceeded to Valley Hardware for one final visit and a few last-minute purchases. Driving along the tree-lined streets and looking out over the fields, he must have reviewed the plan in his mind again and again.
Finally, after two separate purchases at 9:14 and 9:16 a.m., Charlie seemed to have all the items he wanted packed away in the truck: two-by-four and two-by-six wood planks, some with eye bolts already screwed into them; and four bags of plastic ties, tape, tools, nails, binoculars, batteries, flashlights, and a candle. He also carried a 9mm handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-06 bolt-action rifle, and nearly six hundred rounds of ammunition. Clearly, Charlie was prepared to last this one out to the end.
One last item was packed away among the weapons and the hardware, an item that revealed the depths to which Charlie’s mind had sunk: a tube of sexual lubricant.
A checklist, later found in a small spiral notebook hidden inside the cab of his milk truck, detailed each of the items Charlie had with him in the pickup truck that day. The list was compiled methodically, thoroughly, in an attempt to cover every possible eventuality. He drove the short distance back to the intersection of Mine and White Oak roads, parked the truck alongside the auction house, and waited.
THE SOUNDS of laughter bubbled up out of that one-acre plot as the children enjoyed their morning recess. Some of the girls sat together, talking, while others skipped around the yard. The younger boys ran, their energy bursting out of them like rays of light. The morning was gorgeous: the sun shown from a clear blue sky, and it felt like late spring.
There were visitors at the school that day—the teacher’s mother and a few other mothers, some with young children. This wasn’t unusual. Mothers and other relatives often visited the schools, helping children with their lessons and providing support for the teachers. As usual, the students would have been on their best behavior that morning with other adults in attendance.
From a distance, the scene looked perfectly idyllic, a moment in time from a past long gone, when children—the girls in dresses and the boys in straw hats—played outside in the sun and the grass and the dirt. There were no televisions for the children to stare mindlessly at, no computers around which their lives would center. It was a snapshot of fifty years ago. But it wasn’t fifty years ago. It was October 2, 2006. And as all recesses do, that one went a little too fast. Soon it was time to go back inside.
As the children filed back into the school, Charlie, sitting in the truck at the intersection, watched from a distance, peering down White Oak Road through the trees. He could see the school yard and the two white outhouses. A white wooden fence made its way around the square property. The front gate, as usual, was open.
Then he saw what he was waiting for—the children began gathering together and making their way back into the school. Charlie pulled onto White Oak Road. He passed the local swimming pool on his left, closed now for over a month, waiting for next year’s summer to come. He was barely on the road long enough to pick up speed before stopping just past the school lane. Turning the truck slowly, he backed all the way in, until his truck stopped at the front porch.
As he approached the schoolhouse, the gravel crunched under his tires. Less than a year later, when the new school would be built on a different property, it too had a stone driveway, as most of the schools have dirt or stone driveways. But after only a few days in the new school, the surviving children couldn’t bear the sound of a vehicle driving over the stones. It reminded them too much of the day when Charlie’s truck backed into their lane. And so the school board decided to pave the lane.
After shutting off the engine, Charlie walked up onto the front porch of the school, then stepped through the door. As he entered the schoolhouse, several heads turned to see who this visitor might be. Some of the children recognized the tall man as the driver of the truck that picked up the milk from their parents’ farms. They didn’t know his name. Perhaps knowing that the Amish are always quick to lend a hand, he asked the teacher if the students could help him find something. He spoke quietly. It was difficult for some to hear him. The teacher said they could help.
As he walked back out to his truck, he must have realized this was the point of no return. His truck was poised for a quick escape from the horrible path he was about to travel. Looking through the cab of the truck to the empty lane ahead, did he have second thoughts? I wonder. He could have driven away and no one would have thought twice. Or at the very least the teacher would have had a story to tell her family, about the milk-truck driver who randomly stopped by her school that day and acted strangely.
He reached into the truck and pulled out one of his guns and loaded it before walking back inside.
One of the boys would later recall hearing that sound. He was a hunter and knew the implications of that certain clicking. But by then it was too late. The man who hauled milk from their parents’ farms was coming through the door, waving his gun as he issued his first set of instructions.
“Everybody to the front of the room. And get down!”
Amish child’s shoes
CHAPTER FIVE
“Shoot Me First”
A SUDDEN HUSH fell over the schoolroom. Some of the children looked at one another, trying to decide what was happening. Was this some sort of joke? Others couldn’t stop looking at the small steel handgun in Charlie’s hand; it looked so foreign to them. Then, as a group, they slowly stood. Chair legs scraped the floor. Some of the desks rumbled and bumped as the children quickly rushed to the front of the room.
The nightmare had begun.
As soon as Emma, the teacher, saw the handgun, she quickly slipped out the side door in one soft motion, hoping the gunman hadn’t seen her leave. She felt her students would be okay with all the extra visitors in the schoolhouse. One of them, Emma Mae’s mother, followed her out the door. Only a few weeks before, the teacher had had a quick discussion with someone regarding what to do in the case of an emergency—of course, they were talking more about what to do if someone fell on the playground and broke an arm, or needed medical attention. They decided at the time that Emma would run across the field to use the phone at one of the neighboring farms with a phone shanty. They could not have known the timeliness of such a plan.
“Somebody better go get her, or there’s going to be shooting,” Charlie said.
One of the younger boys said he would do it and ran out the side door and never looked back. I can imagine that little boy running across the field with the strength that fear infuses little legs and tender muscles. His lungs burned and his legs pumped faster than they ever had, but he couldn’t catch his teacher or Emma Mae’s mother until he arrived at the farmhouse.
Meanwhile, back inside, Charlie watched as everyone else made their way to the front of the room, by the blackboard. Some sat on the floor, some stood, waiting. What was this man doing? Why did he have a gun? Then he ordered the girls to lie on their stomachs.
“I won’t hurt anyone if you just listen to me.”
The eleven girls arranged themselves in a group along the front of the classroom and got down on the hard floor, their heads toward the chalkboard, looking over their shoulders to see what was going on. Always modest even at their ages, they made sure their dresses stayed pulled down to cover their legs. Charlie took the plastic ties and moved from girl to girl—with some of them he tied their hands and feet, and with others he tied them to one another. Anna Mae, who had wanted to finish the laundry, was not tied at all. There didn’t seem to be any order to it. Already his plot was breaking down. He hadn’t planned on anyone g
etting out. He hadn’t planned on anyone going for help so quickly.
Scattered along the walls of the classroom, the boys sat with the guests who had come that morning. A strange quiet held the room. Charlie didn’t say much. The women didn’t talk. A little boy looked to one of the women for answers. He didn’t say a word, but his eyes looked confused. The woman remained quiet, tried to look peaceful, and put her hands together in prayer. Silently the message spread through the room. Do not speak. Pray.
Mary Liz and Lena, the sisters who shared a bed at home, looked to one of the women sitting close by for answers. Lena asked her what this man was going to do and looked like she might begin to cry. “Cry quietly,” the woman whispered, trying not to get Charles’s attention.
“He won’t hurt you if you listen to him,” she said, looking deep into Lena’s eyes. She believed Charlie when he had said that, believed that this tall, quiet man would not hurt her or the children. Why would he? He seemed too awkward and unimposing to do anything to them. Besides, these were children. Who could possibly harm a child?
But surely the gun eroded her confidence that everything would be all right. If it were only Charlie, things would seem much less intense, but the gun in his hand worried her.
Charlie stepped outside to bring in his supplies, leaving the door open as he strode to his truck. He reached into the bed and pulled out armloads of boards and tools. More ties. More weapons. Back and forth he went, forcing some of the boys to help him.
Naomi Rose, the second grader who didn’t like going to school, couldn’t keep from crying. Have you ever seen a sevenyear-old girl trying not to cry? Her mouth was quivering, and large tears welled up in her dark eyes. One of the visiting mothers, heavily pregnant, tried to comfort her. Eventually, she lowered herself gingerly to the floor, lying beside the frightened girl. The woman would have her baby soon after the shooting. She would name the baby Naomi Rose.