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

by Jonas Beiler

  I feel like traveling on

  No pain nor death can enter there

  I feel like traveling on

  Rob felt the girls were slipping away much too quickly, and it seemed there was nothing they could do about it.

  Half of Rob’s crew continued helping the medical team while he led the other half outside the fence to set up four helicopter landing zones. As the realization of what was happening settled in even further, Rob forced himself to focus on the intricacies of the tasks at hand: setting up the cones to establish a makeshift landing zone, pacing off the yardage to give plenty of clearance for the four zones, making sure there were no overhead obstructions.

  Two landing zones were in the pasture, two more on the Nickel Mines Pool side of the road. When the cones were set, Rob kept himself busy by parking the ambulances as they came in—drivers pulled up to the school and sprinted inside the fence with their crew. Rob would park their vehicles just across the street, always keeping one lane clear.

  These firemen and EMTs were regular members of the community—insurance salesmen, farmers, roofers. Many were Amish. And sure, they often saw the bad side of life—they had to cut people from their cars after drunk-driving accidents and put out deadly fires—but on that morning it was different. The horror of those events ate at their insides as they did their jobs. Most of what they witnessed were accidents or mishaps. Not this—this was premeditated. They helped carry those little children to the ambulances. They had to explain to bystanders that the shooter had killed himself, that the children were being rushed to hospitals all over the state. And they had to do this in their own community while feeling horrified and stunned that an evil so potent had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

  The Amish people were coming from all directions, much as their children had that morning and along the same paths. Many had been there, outside the fence, before the shooting began, but now there were even more of them, walking, even running, through the fields toward the school as news spread about the shooting. Rob had seen this many times before, at fires or accidents. The Amish just came. They wanted to help, and if there was nothing they could do to help, they wanted to offer support with their presence. Rob remembered an accident in which the driver of a car had struck an Amish buggy and killed the Amish man driving it. The accident was very close to the lane that led to the Amish man’s house. Less than an hour after the accident Rob saw some of the Amish neighbors sweeping the lane clean and tidying up. When he asked them what they were doing they explained that the Amish community would come visiting soon and they wanted to help the family prepare the house. When something tragic happens, they come together.

  Standing there, inside the white fence at the schoolhouse, Rob saw an Amish couple pleading with one of the troopers to let them into the school, and as Rob walked closer he overheard the policeman explain above their desperate voices that it was a crime scene. They couldn’t cross the tape.

  “My daughter’s in there!” cried the man, his voice breaking, his wife literally hanging on to his arm. The blood drained from Rob’s face as he thought of his own three children, how he would be feeling, how desperate he would be to get into the building. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to accept a strange man telling him that he wasn’t allowed into the school if his children had been in there.

  “I’m sorry,” the policeman said again, firmly. “You can’t cross the tape.”

  The couple fell to their knees in unison, weeping, holding each other. Rob walked over and put his trembling hand on one of their shoulders.

  “We’re doing everything we can,” he said softly, his voice cracking, a dull ache lingering in his throat. The words felt out of place and almost weak, but he felt he had to say something or try to comfort them somehow. Rob never found out whose parents they were or if they ever saw their child alive again.

  Almost shell-shocked from the emotions, Rob turned to focus on landing the helicopters that would be arriving any minute. As he waited there in the field, his gear feeling heavier by the minute, sweat dripping into his eyes, he heard the chopping sound of an approaching helicopter. To him, this day felt like a day detached from real life, on its own, part of no season or week or month. And all he wanted to do was get his job done well, focus on what he had to do.

  The helicopter buzzed the scene, an action normal for emergency helicopters as they scan their landing area, finally stopping to hover a few hundred feet above the school. Its red bottom contrasted with the pure blue of that day’s sky, and the chopping noise it made felt out of place, adding, if possible, an even greater sense of urgency to the scene. It would be a long time before Rob, or others in those fields that day, could hear the sound of helicopter blades and not be completely swept away with emotion.

  Rob tried to contact that chopper by radio again and again, but with no luck. A sense of impatience rose as Rob attempted to get the helicopter to land. He knew those kids needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible, but the helicopter wasn’t coming down. Finally he called 911.

  “What frequency are the helicopters on? We’re trying to establish communication.”

  Rob waited while they called the Lancaster airport tower to get the frequency. Meanwhile, he ran over to the Bart Fire Department guys and expressed his frustration about not being able to contact the helicopter. Another helicopter was approaching. These guys needed to land!

  At some point, though, the realization sunk in: it was a news helicopter, the first on the scene, and cameras were rolling.

  The medical helicopters arrived soon after that. Dust rose around the school as the rotor blades stirred the air. The grass bent under their weight and the trees blew around, four small hurricanes landing, waiting. Once the helicopters were safely on the ground, Rob walked toward the school. The urgent feeling emanating from that small area had not diminished during the minutes he spent preparing the area for the helicopters. The swirling dust and debris caused by the rotating blades gave the scene an even more dramatic feel, as those on the ground ducked their heads and held their hats down while they worked.

  Soon Rob and his crew were helping to carry the girls on stretchers to the waiting helicopters and ambulances, based on the assessments done by the paramedics on the scene. Some girls were placed in ambulances and whisked away. It was difficult keeping them straight—who was going where—because they had no identification, most of them were similar in size, and with their solid-colored dresses, straight hair pulled back, and no jewelry it was difficult to differentiate them. Besides, they didn’t have time to confirm their identities. These girls needed critical medical attention and they needed it fast.

  The school yard was strewn with medical supplies: ripped plastic bags and their paper instructions, discarded on the spot, littered the yard. The departing ambulances and helicopters whipped up the debris in the wake of their sirens and flashing lights. The wounded Amish girls were swept away in the maelstrom, leaving the troopers, EMTs, and firemen to clean up what was left. Once the girls had been evacuated from the school yard, everything suddenly seemed quiet.

  Vietta had blood on her hands and clothes, and the school yard swarmed with first responders. The police cleared the scene, directing everyone away from the school. Strangely enough, the sun still shone brilliantly, and a soft breeze crept slowly along the autumn fields.

  Some of the Amish neighbors were still gathered along the school yard’s white fence, leaning on the white rail, staring blankly at the school or the ground or the sky. Others slowly walked through the field to one of the neighboring farms that served as a meeting place for the community.

  Rob watched as one young Amish couple walked slowly across the field, through the shadows of the trees and surrounding barns. Behind them the sun reflected off a bright white barn. The man carried a bag in one hand, his other hand thrust deep into his trousers’ pocket. His wife toted a baby in front of her. Their faces were pale and still.

  Everyone on the scene seemed stunned.

>   Rob approached the state police again.

  “Is there anything else we can do to help?” he asked.

  He was told that he and his men could search the field for evidence. Despite the fact that Charles Roberts was dead, the school was still considered a crime scene, and everything would have to be taken apart piece by piece. So Rob gathered his men, and they formed a long line with the five or six other fire companies that had responded. Fifty or sixty men in all, they stood twenty feet apart and began walking slowly, methodically, through the field toward the farm where the Amish community was gathering. The firemen found a pen and a small piece of fabric, and marked each as evidence. While necessary, the walk for evidence seemed to Rob to be painfully after-the-fact, futile.

  Only a few hours prior, those schoolchildren had made their way through those very same fields. Perhaps one of them worried about a troublesome lesson, while another couldn’t wait to tell a friend something new. They had converged on that school from all directions, but now a long line of weary men walked those same fields, their eyes searching the ground for any evidence having to do with the shooting that had shattered those children’s lives.

  As Rob approached the farm, still wearing his fireman’s gear and walking in a line, he looked up and saw the crowd of Amish that had gathered there, waiting for information. Some of the families who had girls inside the school were inside the farmhouse, waiting to find out which hospital their girls had been sent to. Some of the boys who had hid behind the outhouses were there, too, looking down with empty eyes toward the school, or up at the helicopters as they rushed toward the horizon. Many in the crowd looked up and watched the men combing the field, wondering if they had any information.

  Rob looked down the line of volunteer firemen searching the field. Some of those Amish volunteers, especially the ones from Bart Fire Company, knew these children on a first-name basis. They knew the families. This was their community. What were they thinking as their eyes scanned those fields for pieces of fabric or footprints?

  The fire companies completed the search and returned to the schoolhouse, and each step reminded Rob how weary he was, emotionally as much as physically. He and his men waited in a grassy patch close to the school, just to see if there was anything else they could do. Already the Amish from the area were bringing in refreshments and food for the volunteers, more food than they could ever eat. It’s something in the blood of the Amish community—when a tragic event occurs, it’s as if they know they cannot do anything to change what has happened, but they want to help as much as they can, so they provide the basics that are needed to continue on. For an hour or so, Rob’s men sat in the grass. It was a warm day, and with their coats and bunker gear on they had worked up a lather of sweat.

  Rob closed his eyes for a moment, trying to escape that scene. But all he could see were blinking lights. It’s what he saw at night when he went home after responding to an accident—not the sounds, not the smells of gasoline or burning rubber, but the incessant flash of blue and red and white and yellow lights, constantly barraging his mind, refusing to let him forget what he had just been through.

  One group of men gathered around an ambulance. They were strong men, used to seeing injured people. Most of them had seen death before, usually caused by some accident. The group stood there quietly, not speaking. Tears flowed from the eyes of these strong men as they stared into some far-off place. There was anger, too. Frustration that someone would shatter people’s lives with such violence and there was nothing they could do about it. Rob noticed many clenched fists.

  When Rob and his crew arrived back at the Gap firehouse, a sort of helplessness clung to each of them along with the dust and the sweat. They had decided to pass on the debriefing session being held at the Bart Fire Station. The rush and determination to help had passed. The hectic environment under which they thrive and do their jobs was behind them. Thoughts and reflections on the schoolhouse and what they had seen began creeping into the corners of their minds, and a somber melancholy kept them silent. They sat in the fire hall drinking black coffee, watching the news of the horrible event they had just witnessed with their very eyes, now being broadcast around the world.

  But then Rob heard a piece of news he had not heard before. In the craziness of the scene and the speed at which they were forced to operate, there was a detail he’d missed, a detail he now heard for the first time.

  All of the victims were girls.

  That’s when it hit him. Hard. Rob had two daughters of his own. The thought of what had happened suddenly clenched like a hand around his throat. He was done for the day; he dropped his stuff in his locker and went home, where he sat around and stared off into empty spaces. He didn’t go to work the next day.

  When Vietta got home that night, she turned to her husband and in a shaking voice said, “Nobody is going to make it. None of those girls are going to survive. And I’m never, never, going back. I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.”

  Months later I came across a picture of a small, barefooted Amish girl crouched down on the road beside the grass. She wore a deep blue dress the color of the sky. Wisps of her long hair had come loose from where they had been tied back and were lifted up by the wind and caught by the sun’s rays. She stared intently at the ground, perhaps playing in the dirt or watching an insect move slowly along the road.

  Above her a long line of fluorescent yellow police tape flipped back and forth in the breeze.

  Amish women grieving at the fence

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Losing Angie

  THE MOMENT I first heard the news of the shootings will stay with me for the rest of my life, much the same way that people remember where they were when they first heard that an airplane had flown into one of the Twin Towers in New York City. It is one of those split seconds in life when I changed—something inside of me grew older, tired, sad.

  Sometimes life just does that to you.

  I was going to meet my daughter for lunch. The day shone bright blue and was warm for the beginning of October. As I drove up the hill toward the restaurant, I looked to my left, to the north, and out over miles and miles of farmers’ fields. Most of them were harvested, a patchwork of green and tan and brown. Beyond the fields, maybe ten miles off, I could see soft, rolling hills covered with trees changing into their fall colors. It was a beautiful day.

  Up at the top of that hill the wind is almost always blowing, and when I pulled my pickup truck into the restaurant’s parking lot and got out, gusts of wind blew early autumn leaves across the pavement—they weren’t deep colors yet, mostly pale yellow with tints of brown or green. Then I saw my daughter LaVale and walked toward her. She smiled, waving at me, her blond hair flying around in the breeze. But there was concern on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, putting my arm around her.

  “Haven’t you heard?” she asked me.

  “Heard what?”

  “There’s been a shooting at an Amish school in Nickel Mines.”

  The news left me feeling surprised and confused—where had my daughter heard this? Was she sure it was true? Who would ever go into an Amish school with a gun? I found the whole thing very hard to believe. I had grown up in the Amish community. I had been one of those little Amish boys with the straw hats and suspenders, running through the fields barefoot, playing in the large hay barns with my cousins. Having been Amish as a child, having grown up in that kind of tightly knit community, I simply couldn’t believe that this kind of evil had made its way into the Amish world. I felt sure the shooter must be from outside the area, perhaps someone from another city or state—certainly no one who knew and lived among the Amish.

  Apart from the shock I felt at the news, and the sadness I felt for the families, I also experienced a deep sense of a loss of innocence. For a community like the Amish, so family oriented, to experience something like this, well, I wondered what the effect would be.

  Inside the restaurant, the atmosphere was still a
nd eerily quiet. It is normally a busy place, with waitresses flying by and the sounds of a noisy kitchen following them from table to table, but on that morning everyone’s attention was fixed on the television behind the small bar. The news was on, the kind with flashing red banners and continuous updates, and the volume was turned up. The shooter had killed himself. At least two children were dead. Numerous more wounded.

  So it was true. It had happened to us. During the previous decade we had watched with horror and sadness as shootings like this unfolded in different communities around the country: Columbine, and the sniper in Washington, D.C. But I found it hard to imagine something like this happening in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Judging from the comments I overheard, that’s how most people felt: even if there was a shooting in one of our community’s schools, surely it would not be in an Amish schoolhouse. But it had happened, and this time it was Amish blood that was shed ... our blood.

  Two children dead, eight more wounded and in critical condition. Whenever I hear of a child’s passing, my thoughts immediately flash back to a moment in my life that will forever shape who I am; the moment that, more than any other, divides my life into two halves: before and after.

  • • •

  THIRTY-ONE YEARS and twenty-four days before the shooting at the schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, on September 8, 1975, I sat in an office at our church. Two small desks sat against the wall. My wife, Anne, and I worked with the youth group, and I would usually spend Monday mornings at the office, first at a staff meeting and then just catching up on things left over from the weekend services.

  Before going to the church that morning we’d had a big breakfast at our house with a group who had been visiting. My wife cooked up a spread of food, and my daughters ran around underfoot—four-year-old LaWonna was eager to go outside and play with her cousins; nineteen-month-old Angie toddled around, speaking her gibberish nonstop and providing the morning’s entertainment. She could talk and talk, and most of the time we didn’t even know what she was saying, but her voice was pure and innocent and I could listen to her talk all day long.