by Jonas Beiler
Both the Gap Fire Company and the neighboring Bart Fire Company are comprised entirely of volunteers, and 75 percent of the Bart Fire Company is Amish. Though both departments rely on volunteers, they are highly respected for their professionalism, and the Amish firefighters are among the best in the region. The Amish also play a huge part in the fund-raisers, and their community supports the fire halls extensively. When the Amish firefighters come in to help with the fire company’s sale or the various other fund-raisers held at the fire halls, they bring their families along—their wives and children jump right in and help make every event a success.
Over the scanner that morning, Rob heard the Christiana Community Ambulance receive a call from dispatch regarding a frantic member of the Amish community. Christiana, another small town about five miles south of Gap on Route 41, provides ambulance services to many of the smaller towns in the area, such as Atglen, Parkesburg, and Gap. The voices scratched their way through the scanner, and Rob listened, the way he always did, with one ear on the scanner and the other attending to his insurance business. Initially, though, the call came in only as an emotional problem and nothing was mentioned about a shooter. Later, Rob would discover the reason for this classification: the initial caller sounded hysterical, and the dispatcher couldn’t get any information from the caller, so they called an ambulance in order to get the call started. It would be easy for a dispatcher to think twice about passing on any information about a shooter at an Amish school. It was just too unbelievable.
But even as the bedlam of that morning began to unfold, as Charlie stood in the classroom telling the women to leave with their babies, the call drifted from Rob’s mind in an instant—he had plenty of work to take care of at the office, and he didn’t think that someone being a little upset would be enough to sound the alarm that called volunteers to the fire department. It was the same everywhere that morning: normal Monday activities carried on, and people went about their business having no idea that they were about to be changed forever by the atrocious acts of someone in their own community.
Christiana is another one of those small eastern Pennsylvania towns with a few quaint streets winding up and over and around the train tracks that dash straight through the hills. While Route 41 is a truckers’ road—in 1997 a national study was conducted that called Route 41 the third deadliest highway in the United States—Christiana is an island of a town surrounded by farming country. If you follow the tree-lined streets of Christiana in October, they fade off into the hills of western Chester County, and you quickly find yourself lost in beautiful, winding forest roads surrounded alternately by sloping farmers’ fields and forestcovered hills yielding gold and red leaves.
At Christiana’s emergency response center, just off the highway, two emergency medical technicians stand by to respond with each ambulance when they are called out. On the morning of October 2, one of the EMTs on duty, Vietta Wood, sat in the station talking to her partner, Samantha Jackson. Their time in the station was mostly spent filling out paperwork from previous calls, doing station chores, or just hanging out and talking.
When the call came in that morning, the call center initially dispatched Vietta and Samantha to a farm in Nickel Mines for an emotional problem, the same call that Rob heard from behind the desk at his insurance agency. Neither of the EMTs thought too much about the call as they got their gear ready, climbed into the ambulance, and pulled out of the station, sirens blaring. They had received plenty of “emotional problem” calls in their time as EMTs, and there was no reason to think this one would be any different from the myriad emotional breakdowns or domestic situations they had run into before.
Vietta knew those roads well—like most Lancaster County residents, she had grown up there, still lived close to her parents, and spent time with friends she had known since childhood. She had seen a lot of tragedy during her years as an EMT, but those things did little to dim her brilliant smile or kind personality. Cruising down those old roads, her mind automatically reviewed procedures and protocol. The calls EMTs respond to run the entire spectrum, from stubbed toes to massive strokes, from simple cuts to serious car accidents. But no car crash or heart attack victim could have prepared Vietta for the things she would see that day.
Normally, after the initial call, the dispatch center would come back over the radio and give Vietta an update such as “there is a couple having a domestic dispute” or “there is a young boy having trouble breathing.” But on that call they didn’t receive any additional details. The scanner was quiet.
Then the initial lack of information was followed by some confusing instructions: they were not to proceed to the farm where the call had been made, but were to stage at the corner of White Oak Road and Mine Road by the Nickel Mines Auction. Rob Beiler would hear these instructions over his scanner and wonder at the strangeness of them, that an ambulance would be called to the scene and then be asked to wait at a staging area hundreds of yards away.
By the time the ambulance was approaching Nickel Mines Auction, Vietta heard a few other updates and slowly began to realize what was going on. Then the school came into view, and immediately she knew. The scene was chilling. The building, normally nestled peacefully in the middle of those fields, was surrounded by police cruisers, some in the driveway and others parked in the surrounding fields. The state troopers moved around the perimeter fence with guns drawn like soldiers trying to avoid a sniper.
Vietta noticed the families lining the fence, too, just outside the crime-scene tape. Some held their heads in their hands, some paced back and forth. Amish women, in their solid colored dresses and hair coverings, held both hands over their mouths. Others were restrained by the police from running inside to rescue their children. When Vietta parked her vehicle she could hear parents crying out for their kids. Could the children hear those voices from inside the school?
Vietta and Samantha were a Basic Life Support (BLS) unit, as opposed to the Advanced Life Support (ALS) units stationed at hospitals. In severe situations, ALS units typically start IVs and administer drugs at the scene. Yet at that time, so soon after the call, Vietta and Samantha were the only ambulance crew on site, along with a fire truck (from Bart Fire Station, only a mile up the road on the outskirts of Nickel Mines), and what they were about to encounter would stretch their training to its limits.
Still waiting in the ambulance, Vietta could see the troopers beginning to gather at the front door and around the windows, looking for a way to get inside the schoolhouse. She called 911 and spoke with Sky FlightCare out of Brandywine Hospital. Her husband worked there but was not on duty that day.
“You guys have to get a medic unit and a helicopter on standby right away! Get in the air but do not fly over the scene, or anywhere close. Just be ready.”
As Vietta continued talking with her husband’s supervisor about the scene, a staccato sound pierced the morning: Pop, pop, pop. Over and over again. The police raced for the school. Vietta’s hands clenched the steering wheel. The supervisor on the other end of the line could hear the gunshots.
“What’s going on out there?” the supervisor yelled.
Vietta was speechless. She wondered how many children were still in the school. At that point she didn’t know that some of them had been allowed to leave.
The gunshots also stirred the parents and relatives standing along the fence like a stick poked into a bees’ nest—they went from anxious and worried to frantic and desperate. Again police had to keep some of them from storming through the fence and into the school yard. Some fell knees-first onto the hard cornfields. Others leaned against the fence like marionettes with their strings cut.
Vietta watched as the policemen first smashed their way through the front door, then began removing whatever it was that had kept the doors from opening in the first place. Soon they were filing in and out of the building—many officers racing into the schoolhouse, and then carefully walking back out, each carrying what looked like a sack of grain, some drap
ed over their shoulders, some held close to their chests. Ever so gently, each laid his precious burden down on the grass outside the school.
That’s when the officers began frantically waving Vietta to the scene. She pulled up in her ambulance and saw them lying there, the ten sacks of grain now transformed into ten small bodies all in a row, and each had at least one state trooper by her side. Some of the troopers tore off their shirts and used them to try to staunch the flow of blood seeping from their young victims. Others placed their hands tightly on pressure points to lessen the bleeding. They were all covered in a slick, red wetness that added weight to their clothing. The last thing Vietta said, before jumping out of the ambulance and entering the scene, she shouted over the radio.
“Put five helicopters in the air, now!”
• • •
THE CHATTER continued on Rob Beiler’s scanner, and soon he heard the ambulance call back to dispatch that they were waiting in Nickel Mines and not going to the scene. Strange, he thought to himself: the ambulances usually jump straight in. Rob resituated himself in his chair and rested his chin in his hand, listening closer to the calls and the information being relayed back and forth.
Suddenly the requests began escalating far out of proportion to anything he would have expected—Pennsylvania State Police were on the scene requesting backup, multiple ambulances, and medical helicopters. Backup and helicopters? Rob put down his pen and sat quietly in his chair, pensive, now listening intently as events began to unfold. When their neighboring fire company, Bart Fire Department, was called to the scene, the responder in him took over—it was in his blood to get his own fire apparatus and rescue vehicles ready as quickly as possible, just in case they got the call.
He stood from his chair, straightened some items on his desk, and walked out of his office toward the door.
“Something’s going on down at the Nickel Mines schoolhouse,” he told his coworkers over his shoulder, concern etched in his voice. “I’m going to the fire station in case we get the call.”
During Rob’s two-minute drive to the fire department, his pager finally went off, and this time the buzzing filled him with a strange foreboding. It wasn’t like any other call he had received—there was a mysteriousness to what was happening in Nickel Mines, and he found himself feeling tense, on edge.
He pulled into the fire hall parking lot in the middle of Gap, surrounded by rows of historic homes, the traditional kind with large, covered front porches and steep peaks. At the top of the hill a long-abandoned train track came to an end on top of tall trusses in midair, perhaps once the dumping point for some sort of rail-bound material. A gray stone church was just around the corner from the fire hall, empty on that Monday, and beside it a large graveyard.
Inside the firehouse, Rob changed into his gear and began preparing the truck while other volunteers arrived. Rob listened to the scanner but picked up precious little information—there was a strangeness to the calls, and uneasiness settled into the pit of his stomach; he still had no idea what was going on in Nickel Mines, or why such a vast array of emergency medical teams were being called to the scene. In fact, he still didn’t know exactly where the scene was.
Rob rode in the officer’s seat in the rescue truck—he and three others rotate as duty chief for a week at a time, and that was his week on. A total of seven men rode in the truck with Rob as they cruised out of Gap on Mine Road toward Nickel Mines, approximately five miles away. Pieces of information kept trickling through—then they heard something about a gunman at an Amish school. A gunman? In Nickel Mines? It didn’t seem possible.
But when the medical helicopters started getting called in, Rob heard confirmation that it was an Amish school. The first school he pictured was not the one on White Oak Road—there are numerous Amish schoolhouses tucked away in those fields. The one he pictured in his mind was on Wolfrock Road. This school sits up on a tree-covered hill, surrounded by shrubs and tucked away in the forest, only barely visible from the road. Little did he know that this school would not have been ideal for Charlie Roberts’s plan—too many bushes hindered the view from the windows, and someone inside would have precious little knowledge of what was going on around the perimeter.
The fire truck made a hard left, and coming into view was the Amish schoolhouse on Wolfrock Road. Rob looked intently at the school, expecting to see state troopers or ambulances, but what he saw sent goose bumps down his arms: a row of young Amish boys in straw hats stood on the white wooden fence, their legs stiff against the rails, hands shielding their eyes as they peered across the fields and into the valley where the Nickel Mines school sat. They were trying to see what all the commotion was about.
Suddenly the school across from the Nickel Mines public pool flashed through his mind. They continued on toward that school, following Mine Road.
Rob’s fire truck was the third vehicle on the scene—the Christiana ambulance had arrived first, followed by the Bart Fire Company. By this time the ambulance had backed up to the school, and police were rushing in and out the schoolhouse door. State troopers ran around the school like ants around a disturbed anthill. Rob stared at the cornfields and woods surrounding the schoolhouse—was the shooter still out there? Was he still waiting to pick more people off? He turned to the guys in his truck.
“No one gets out until I come back.”
He hopped out the door and found a state policeman.
“Sir, I need to know, is the scene secure? Is the shooter still on the loose?”
“No,” he said. “The shooter is deceased.”
The shooter is deceased. Such a simple pronouncement. For Rob it meant that he could allow his men to proceed to the scene. For Charlie’s wife it would mean her husband, the father of her children, was gone. For Charlie’s parents it would mean the loss of a son. So many things glossed over in such a short, but necessary, sentence. The shooter is deceased.
“Okay, what do you want us to do?” Rob asked quickly.
“Send all your men up to help with EMS,” the policeman yelled over his shoulder. The shooting had just taken place, and there was still only the initial ambulance on the scene, the ambulance that had been called to respond to an emotional problem, the ambulance occupied by Vietta and her partner, Samantha.
Rob mustered his men and they ran toward the school. At most, five minutes had passed since the police stormed the building. The pickup truck Charlie drove to the school still sat outside the door, its back window blown out by the last shotgun blast he had directed at the state troopers before turning the gun on himself.
Rob caught his breath as he saw the number of victims lying in the yard outside the school: ten children lined up, each with a state trooper at her side. What had happened here? He ordered his men to help however they could, directing the more medically trained to join up with the emergency response teams.
Samantha and Vietta split up and began working at a steady, methodical pace, going from girl to girl, quickly checking vitals, performing triage. Two or three EMTs from the Bart Fire Company’s QRS (Quick Response Service) jumped in and started helping as well. Although her training enabled Vietta to respond with technical precision, adrenaline raced through her body as she began checking blood pressure, putting pressure on wounds, and shouting instructions to anyone who would help. Some of the troopers still held the wounded girls, urging them to hold on.
Rob’s team did their best to help, but as he surveyed the scene he felt the effort was too little, too late. There were so many wounds to cover, so many children to treat, so many decisions to make. The scene was chaotic—ten girls were shot, the shooter had shot himself, helicopters were on the way, and only four medics were on the scene. Troopers ran in and out of the school, still wielding shotguns. Broken glass and shredded wood and shotgun shot littered the floor. There was blood everywhere, on the walls and the floor. Innocent blood. Vietta forged ahead, doing what she could to prepare the girls for their trips to the hospitals and emergency centers in the a
rea.
One of the girls died almost immediately: twelve-year-old Anna Mae, who had wanted to stay home to help with the laundry. She was one of the first girls that the teacher’s father saw when he ran down to the school yard, moments after finding out that his family was safe. He was devastated when he saw Anna Mae, and he didn’t think anyone else would make it out of that school alive.
Rob looked inside the school. Mixed in with the evidence of violence were the symbols of childhood innocence: desks and chairs, the chalkboard with writing on it, books and papers and projects. Pencils and pens and paper, everything shredded from the shooting.
Soon ambulances screamed in along White Oak Road, pulling to a quick stop in the grass beside the public swimming pool. Emergency medical staff rushed as fast as they could to the school, weighed down by their fluorescent orange bags and pieces of equipment. The atmosphere around the school was electric, tense.
Don’t look at their faces, Rob told himself. It was the one way he could sleep at night after pulling someone from the wreckage of a car or listening to someone screaming in pain. When a leg is caught in a car, he focused on disentangling the leg. If an arm was caught, he focused on helping to free the arm. Ignoring faces allowed him to work, to focus, to remain emotionally detached from the situation. He and his men circled the scene, helping where they could.
But the girls were all in critical condition, and, despite the critical care given minutes after the shooting, another girl passed away before she could be taken to the hospital: second-grader Naomi Rose Ebersole, who would sometimes cry because she didn’t want to go to school, who only that morning had been humming her favorite hymn:
My heavenly home is bright and fair