Think No Evil: Inside the Story of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting...and Beyond

by Jonas Beiler

  As I pondered in the quiet of my soul what we had talked about, I became obsessed with knowing how Christ loved me. My search for an answer to this question of Christ’s love became a passionate one, to the point where my life was driven by these thoughts. It was the only hope I had: discovering how Christ loved me so that I could love my wife that same way.

  I remember making that decision—one of those decisions in life that is impossible to forget. I decided that, with the help of God, I would love my wife and my children the way that Christ loved me. Life was never the same again. I could not look at my wife or my children, or anybody else for that matter, without wondering how Christ loved them. It’s hard to understand how bad things happen to good people, but I’ve often said to my wife that this is just earth, things are not perfect here, and I’m looking forward to better days in paradise.

  What I did not understand at the time was that becoming obsessed with God’s love for me, and becoming equally passionate about discovering how to pass that love on to others, had a deep impact on my soul.

  My life had been torn down but during the rebuilding I became centered on two quests: discovering how it was that Christ loved me, and discovering how I could be a conduit to express that to others. This quickly took the focus away from those who had caused me pain. It’s amazing to me how one day I was so mad at God that I didn’t want to see the sun rise, and the next day I had this escalated curiosity about his love for me. I think that’s an example of the wide range of emotions anybody can feel in the midst of a crisis. You just can’t prepare for these times.

  I often wonder why people can respond to similar tragedies so differently. I contribute my response to the culture I was raised in. My parents were old-order Amish and taught me many of the life skills and faith-based disciplines that came to my rescue during that time of deep need. In my counseling career I’ve noticed that people in crisis who have had little or no stability in how they were raised tend to wander and flounder much more than those who have some stability in their background. I thank God for my heritage and treasure it deeply. I know that the outside world wonders what the Amish lifestyle is all about. The Amish certainly admit that they don’t do everything right. But there is so much about the way they do live life that I would not want to change.

  In the days following the meeting Anne and I had with the counselor, I remember thinking, “Now I will do my best to express this kind of love to my wife, and maybe in a couple of months this marriage will be restored.” Was I in for a surprise! My wife, mired in that relationship, had never had a chance to work through the heartache of losing Angie. She quickly became preoccupied with that long-ignored pain and where it took her. She found it impossible to respond to me physically. She couldn’t even initiate something as small as holding hands.

  At this point I began to understand, at least in part, what her struggles were about, and she agreed to go for marriage counseling with me to a counselor in our church, Wayne Welch. He was kind enough to make himself available to us. Not talking about our feelings was part of the culture that we were raised in, so after the shooting, when I heard that the Amish mothers supported one another by talking about what had happened and what they were experiencing, I was glad. I knew what that would do for them.

  I continued my journey to restore the marriage. Several months later I heard my wife say to her sister that she was not sure what was happening, but she found herself being attracted to my spirit. Little milestones like that gave me the courage to continue to do the right thing. Somewhere in all that pain, confusion, and discouragement I made a commitment to myself: no matter how I felt, I was going to do my best to continue to do the right thing.

  Then, two and a half years later, the landmark experience occurred.

  We were walking through a shopping mall with our children in Tyler, Texas, and I felt her slip her hand into mine.

  It was two and a half years after deciding to love her the way Christ loved me. It was nearly ten years after Angie had died—nearly ten years since she had initiated any sort of physical intimacy with me. You might think this was a small act, but for me it was huge. For a split second I felt nine feet tall because what I had hoped would happen was finally happening. But the next second a wave of humility hit me and I felt two inches tall—I realized that what had just happened was not about me but about Christ’s love working through both of us. Both of us. Not just me.

  It sounds like a great story today because it has a happy ending. But I have to be honest, we still have our struggles. The arguments and misunderstandings and insecurities still crop up from time to time, no matter how far we have come. In other words, recovering from something like this doesn’t mean you’ll have a “pain-free” marriage. I’m not sure that’s ever possible. But restoration is possible. Whenever I am given the chance to introduce my wife, I like to introduce her as my girlfriend, my best friend, my wife, the mother of all my children, the grandmother of all my grandchildren. It had always been my dream, when we were going through those dark times, that I would be able to say that.

  My dream came true because of Christ’s love.

  I HAVE counseled many people in my life. Even after they know all the facts—who they need to forgive, what forgiveness is and what it is not, and why forgiveness is important—and decide they want to forgive, there is always one last question.

  How?

  How can I ever forgive my unfaithful spouse?

  How can I ever forgive my betraying friend?

  How can I ever forgive that violent stranger?

  How can I ever forgive God for what happened to my child?

  How can I ever forgive myself for that huge mistake?

  These questions get to the heart of the matter, and there is one way of looking at forgiveness that has been extremely helpful to me. Richard called it “editing your history.” Basically, that means that instead of dwelling on our feelings when bad things happen, we need to reinterpret our painful experiences.

  Through counseling and good information I realized that my wife was the victim of “abuse of spiritual power,” whereas originally I had looked at it as a coworker-to-coworker affair. The two are very different. Over time I began to feel better because I could reinterpret what happened into a less painful conclusion with new and better information. Something I always like to remember is that we don’t live with the facts of our lives; we live with the conclusions that we make about the facts of our lives. It’s important to make peace with our past because without doing so the past will hinder our joy for the present, and keep us from looking forward with any hopeful or joyful expectation of the future. My wife has also experienced a perfect example of this kind of reinterpretation. For years after our relationship was restored, she walked around with these feelings of guilt that she hadn’t been a good mother to the girls during the difficult times we had following Angie’s death. She simply could not forgive herself for what she saw as a period of mistreatment or neglect of our two daughters.

  I would constantly tell her, “Honey, it wasn’t that bad. I was there, too. You were a good mother to our girls. Your feelings of guilt and condemnation are not based on truth.” Still, she couldn’t discard them. She could not forgive herself.

  After my mother passed away we were going through some of her things in my parents’ house. We stumbled upon ten years’ worth of letters from Anne to my mother. We didn’t have enough money when we lived in Texas to be making long distance phone calls to Pennsylvania very often, which at the time were rather expensive. In addition, my parents did not have the convenience of a telephone in the house because they were old-order Amish. So Anne would send a letter to my mother just about every week detailing our daughters’ lives. And there they were, all of these letters, all of those years.

  I was sitting in a neighboring room as my wife read through these letters with one of our daughters. They would laugh when they read about something silly my daughter did when she was six, and they would cry as some of t
he old emotions came back.

  “Today, LaVale dove off the high dive at the pool for the first time.”

  “Today the girls and I made cookies for the neighbors.”

  It was a beautiful moment. And in that moment, Anne realized she was not a terrible mother. In fact, she was a very good mother. This enabled her not only to see the truth regarding her mothering skills, but it also allowed her to continue the process of forgiving herself for the things she had done in the past.

  This is what I mean when I say reinterpreting painful experiences or reinterpreting the past. The past doesn’t change. Just the way we look at it. This had been a ten-year period during which Anne felt absolutely horrible about her mothering. Ten years about which she could only see the bad things because she was preoccupied with the struggles in her life. Reading through the letters she sent to my mother helped her understand that not everything in that ten-year time frame was as bad as she thought. Being able to see this period in a different light, through those letters, was key to her eventually forgiving herself.

  Note that the history did not change, but her interpretation of it did. Everything has three ways in which it can be interpreted: the way I see it, the way you see it, and the way it really is. So it becomes necessary to come to a new understanding of what really took place. That often means getting new perspective on the events. One of the best ways to gather new perspective is to talk to family members, friends, counselors, or to God in prayer.

  I also remember times when I felt like so much of life was wasted because I felt betrayed by people I trusted. I thought my pastor was my best friend, and I looked up to him and trusted him as my spiritual mentor. I knew our marriage wasn’t perfect after Angie died but I still felt hopeful. Yet I later discovered that other people knew about the pastor’s relationship with my wife before I did! I felt completely betrayed. But, through an effort to edit my history, I can walk back through those years I once felt were wasted and pick out a few flowers to enjoy.

  Another example of this occurred when I was growing up. My family was not quick to hug one another or express love and affection. Somewhere in my early thirties I began to wonder why my dad never told me that he loved me. I just don’t remember ever hearing that. I never doubted his love for me—that wasn’t the issue. But I began to feel a little bit disappointed that he had never expressed it to me in words.

  It is in these seemingly small thoughts or memories or emotions that unforgiveness can be quick to jump in. And this is where it can be very important to reinterpret these painful memories or experiences. I am not talking about lying to ourselves about what has happened, but about reinterpreting the facts.

  One day I overheard my dad talking to someone. He said he couldn’t understand how people used the word “love” so loosely. They love their house. They love ice cream.

  “I might like those things, but I don’t love them,” I heard him say. “I reserve the word ‘love’ for God.”

  It suddenly dawned on me that my dad had such a high view of God, the word “love” couldn’t be used for the things of this earth. I allowed this small piece of information to help me reinterpret my past. I realized that my dad just couldn’t bring himself to love anyone but God, but that didn’t mean he didn’t care deeply for me. All kinds of healing took place inside me at that moment—the experience didn’t change, but the way I looked at it did. If I were choosing to live a life of unforgiveness I could have easily shrugged off that information or thought to myself that it still didn’t make up for a childhood of never hearing “I love you.” But I didn’t do that. I allowed that new understanding to change the way I looked at my father and my childhood. It was an extremely healthy moment for me.

  The Amish are quick to edit their history. Only hours after Charles Roberts was identified as the shooter, I heard some Amish men saying things like, “He must have been very sick to have done something like this.” They were not standing around basking in their anger or hate, saying things like, “If he was here right now I’d beat him to within an inch of his life.” They weren’t accusing Charles’s family of somehow being responsible. They chose to interpret history in a way that allowed them to have sympathy for Charles and his family.

  Forgiveness is a choice that the Amish people made, but I know by hearing from these families that dealing with the emotional aftermath of October 2 is a long process. Tragedy changes you. Things will never be the same. But I think the Amish people give us an example of a determined culture trying to make the most out of a horrible situation. And, believe me, that takes time.

  These days our culture seems completely based around fast food and instant this and quick-fix that, and sometimes that interferes with the healing process. We think if one counseling session or a couple of quick prayers haven’t changed our feelings for us then there must be something really wrong, something that cannot change. But there are no right or wrong feelings, there is no right or wrong way to feel when tragedies come our way. We feel what we feel because we are human beings.

  Many people ask me, if they have truly forgiven, why can’t they forget what happened? Why don’t they feel any different than they did before? My sister-in-law, who was operating that tractor when our daughter was killed, offers a helpful alternative to the old Sunday-school adage “forgive and forget.” “No,” she says. “We forgive because we cannot forget.”

  We may wish these painful memories would go away, but the truth is that they won’t. But when you can give horrible things that happen to you a less painful interpretation through a process of talking to your friends, prayer, and counseling, you can reinterpret your experiences to a less painful conclusion and begin to feel better over time.

  Little girl exploring grass

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Let the New Grass Grow

  Gates wide open.

  Let’s think back to the scene my wife saw after driving those backcountry roads shortly after the shooting took place—back to that school gate, wide open and unlocked. Nothing could better symbolize the Amish community’s forgiving response to the death of their daughters, or their determination not to let a tragedy isolate them from their neighbors.

  But for anyone who still finds such forgiveness difficult to believe, or who still sees the Amish as unemotional stoics, there are also other images from those days. After all, the Amish are regular people, just like you and me. They still felt immense pain, in spite of their decision to forgive. Their children were still hurting from what they had experienced. And they all still had a difficult question to resolve: What should they do with the school?

  Some wondered if having the children go back to the same school would help them in their emotional recovery; others felt the building represented too many painful memories, too many toxic images, and should be torn down. The parents of the schoolchildren thought long and hard, and in the end decided a fresh start was what everyone needed.

  Before the sun came up on Thursday, October 12—just ten days after the shootings—an outside demolition crew arrived. Under the menacing glare of two or three spotlights, the building was bulldozed, the concrete blocks and cement floor slabs broken up and carried away in dump trucks. In one photo that I saw, the claw of a large Caterpillar tractor reached inside the roof and peeled it back like the lid of a tin can, while a smaller bulldozer worked around the back, scooping up debris. In the background, only darkness. Soon the school was nothing more than a pile of rubble, with police tape and “No Trespassing” signs threading their way through the crushed cinder blocks.

  The hole left by the removed foundation was leveled with the surrounding grass. The perimeter wood fence was disassembled. The next morning a lone Amish man raked the dirt flat, evening out the deep tracks left by the heavy machinery. His straw hat and black clothing blended in with the soil and the surrounding fields of short grass and corn stubble.

  Only the trees remained, and the grass and weeds would quickly grow over the rich, brown dirt. By the next spring no
stranger would know a building had been there—the surrounding fields grew in and over what was once the school’s property. Six months later, when passing through the area, even I, a local, had trouble figuring out where the school had been.

  AT THE end of the school year, sometime in April 2007, on a clear spring day, the Amish invited Vietta and Samantha, along with some of the medevac helicopter crew members, to the school’s year-end picnic. When Vietta drove up to the school, her breathing felt deliberate, her heart rate rising. By that spring she had already met all of the girls’ parents, and she felt honored to have been invited to the picnic. Emotionally it was a confusing prospect—on the one hand, Vietta felt that a celebration was in order for the five girls who had survived; on the other hand, it was yet another reminder of the five girls who hadn’t made it. She wondered how the day would go.

  They were in their new school, with its paved drive, the building tucked away in the woods barely a mile from the old schoolhouse demolished months before. It was a more secluded spot, up a long drive and nestled on a hillside among some trees. The new school felt safe in its separation from the outside world.

  All of the families were there, and Vietta even met the boys who had been in the school just before the shooting. She made the rounds, and all of the children were excited to meet her. She asked them questions about their new school and what they were going to do in the summer. The children seemed genuinely happy that Vietta and the rest of the emergency responders had come to their picnic.