by Jonas Beiler
In spite of living in a small mobile home and making only enough money to live month to month, we were a happy family. My wife’s parents lived just up the lane in a large stone house, my brother-in-law and his family lived down the lane from us, and we spent much of our time with family. It was a peaceful life, and when I compare our lives before that day to our lives after that day, it seemed a simple time as well. When I wasn’t at the church preparing for youth events I was running my body shop just a few miles away, repairing cars, reversing the effects of accidents and time. It was one of my passions in life, and the business did pretty well for us. I rarely felt unsettled or had any sort of longing for more money. We were content.
That hectic Monday morning went by quickly, and soon I was in the office, enjoying the peace and quiet, getting ready for another week. I don’t remember exactly what time it was, but at some point during the morning I heard footsteps coming through the church toward the office. The footsteps were fast, someone urgently crossing the sanctuary. I thought to myself, Something isn’t right. There was this feeling in the pit of my stomach that something bad had happened. The door shot open, and I looked up expectantly.
“There’s been an accident. Angie is hurt, she’s at the clinic.”
There were no other details. I pictured Angie, with her blond curls and blue eyes, talking incessantly. My insides sunk and the blood left my face. In an instant I felt numb. In that moment nothing else mattered: not the work I had been doing, not the cars at the body shop, not the long to-do list. I ran out the door and headed for the local clinic, only a few miles away.
I can still picture the front of that clinic on the day of Angie’s accident: large glass doors under a peaked roof, with bushes on either side. Strange—it was also a Monday morning, but in September, not October, and I was thirty years younger, in my late twenties—practically still a kid. There at the glass doors stood Anne. She was barefoot. She looked out of place and almost comical in her bathrobe, but nothing about her expression looked silly in the least—there was a look on her face that I had never seen before, and it scared me. It was as if someone had taken the soul out of her, leaving only flesh and bones. No spirit or life.
“She’s gone,” she said in a hoarse whisper, her face heavy with despair. “Angie’s dead.”
How can you process that kind of information? How can you take a fact so horrible in its essence and digest it, let it sink into your mind, without getting physically sick? I drew Anne toward me and held her because it seemed the right thing to do, but inside I felt myself fall into a daze. I lived in that fog for months, maybe years. We are so unprepared for moments like that, and when they happen it is difficult to predict how we will react emotionally.
Sobs threatened to split Anne’s small body in two. I don’t remember if I cried at that moment. There was just this immense emptiness—nothing else in life held any meaning at that point. Anne held my hand and led me into the clinic. I followed her on complete autopilot, a robot, through the glass doors and into the dimly lit building.
We walked inside and made our way down the corridor to the room where Angie’s body lay. It was still morning, maybe eight or nine o’clock, I’m not sure. How quickly life can change. Only a few hours before, I had been rejoicing in a beautiful day, working hard at the church I loved, feeling so content with life. Then, in the blink of an eye, I was walking into the room that held my daughter’s dead body.
In the middle of the room was a small examination table, and on it lay Angie’s body, covered by a white sheet. I could see the outline of her tiny face, pulled tight and flat by the sheet. One of her little nineteen-month-old hands wasn’t covered—do you know how small a toddler’s hand looks at that age? Only two or three inches long, her small hand still appeared perfect, but her pale skin looked completely colorless, matching the whiteness of the sheet.
I reached down and held on to her hand, felt her tiny fingers. They were still warm. The nurse came in and allowed us to pull the sheet down and uncover her face—Angie still looked perfect. Her golden hair swirled around her head in beautiful curls. I could not comprehend that she was gone.
Anne held on tight, her arms wrapped around me. Suddenly she looked up at me and asked why we couldn’t pray for her. If we prayed, and truly believed, couldn’t God bring her back to us? Anne’s face was desperate. I was scared at what I saw in her eyes: a sadness I had never encountered before.
I looked down at Angie. She looked so peaceful, lying there. I thought about the verse in 2 Corinthians that talks about how being absent from the body means to be present with the Lord, and for a moment I pictured her walking along grassy slopes in heaven, approaching some far-off golden city.
“She is where we want to be someday,” I said quietly to Anne, barely able to speak through the tears and the ache in my throat. “Do you really want to bring her back to this? This pain and sorrow?”
We stood there for a long time in that small examination room at the clinic. On our way back home I learned that my sister-in-law Fi had backed one of the small tractors out of the barn and hadn’t seen Angie running up the lane to her grandmother’s house. Angie’s tiny body was no match for the slowly backing tractor. I still couldn’t believe it. Angie was gone.
EATING LUNCH with La Vale, I watched the news coming at us from the television behind the bar. I drank some coffee and stared into the cup. If anyone in the restaurant spoke, it was in hushed tones. Some of the waitresses looked like they might start crying. I sighed.
“I’d better get going,” I said. “I’ve got a meeting coming up.”
I left some money on the table, and then La Vale and I walked outside. I hugged her, perhaps a little closer than usual, thinking of those parents who were just coming to grips with the news that their child might be gone, thinking of Angie. There is nothing I have experienced more heart wrenching or mentally disorienting than having my child die before I did. It is an event completely contrary to the natural cycle of things. Yet it happens, and we are left holding the numerous, jagged-edged pieces of our lives, wondering if they will ever fit back together.
I got into my truck, drove across the countryside on back roads that wound and rose and dipped across the fields and hills toward my office. It was a beautiful fall day, and the air gushing in my window smelled of autumn and harvest. I turned on the radio to listen to the news, but the voices just drifted past me. I was so far from that place and time. It never ceases to amaze me how certain things can trigger emotions from over thirty years ago. Those emotions feel so fresh, as if the event had just happened and I was experiencing it for the first time.
JUST AS my meeting started, I got a call. It was my brother-in-law Mike.
“Hi, Jonas, where are you?” he asked me.
“I’m here at a meeting. Have you heard about the shooting in Nickel Mines? What’s going on over there?”
“I’m here at the King family farm, right across the field from the school,” he said, his voice trembling slightly.
“Okay,” I said. “I know where that is.”
“Jonas,” he said, pausing for a moment before continuing. “I think you should be here.”
It took me only a moment to make the decision. I offered my apologies to the man I was meeting with, explained the situation. He understood. Before I knew it I was back in my truck, driving the winding roads through the countryside once again, this time going toward the Amish school in Nickel Mines. I wondered what I would find when I arrived.
The whole way there I listened to the news, but once again I found it difficult to concentrate on what was being discussed. Ten children shot. The shooter dead. Such an immense waste of life. My mind wandered to the parents. I remembered what it felt like to live through those first horrifying moments. In fact, I was living through them again: the moment I found out Angie was in an accident, the moment Anne told me she was gone, and the moment I saw Angie for myself, lying peacefully on an examination table in a small country clinic.
> I thought of the process the parents of these girls would encounter, the many years of difficult moments ahead of them. I thought of the numbness that comes in those first few hours and days and weeks. The sharp points of despair and anguish that sometimes threaten to take you over the edge. There are times, many long years later, when the event lies in the past but still lends a weight to your heart that never goes away. The accident, the event, is one thing, but the long road they had ahead of them filled me with a sense of such deep sorrow and heaviness that I found my eyes filling with tears as I drove.
Twenty minutes later I saw a roadblock: some orange barriers placed in the roadway, flanked by some local police and first responders. They were keeping people from driving too close to the schoolhouse or filling up the roads and blocking emergency workers. I wondered if they would let me through. I pulled up slowly, then stopped and leaned my head out the window.
One of the men at the roadblock recognized me and knew I had founded the counseling center.
“Oh, hi, Jonas. Thanks for coming,” he said, as he pulled the barrier aside and let me through.
Another half mile down the road there was another roadblock.
“Hi, I’m Jonas Beiler from the Family Resource and Counseling Center,” I began.
“Oh, yeah,” the man said. “I’ve heard of your counseling center. You need to be in there.”
He, too, pulled the barrier aside and let me through.
As I approached the school, coming up on Mine Road, I saw a strange sight: five news helicopters circled in the beautiful blue sky over the open fields. The chopping sound of their blades seemed distant and otherworldly.
I came up Mine Road but couldn’t turn onto White Oak to get close to the school, so I pulled down a long stone lane bordered by cornfields that led to the King farm, where Mike said he was waiting. The field rose on a small hill between the farm and the school, but the corn was cut and I could just barely see the schoolhouse and the tree beside it. What I could see was all movement—police officers walking around the property, firemen cleaning up around the scene, EMTs putting equipment back into their ambulances.
Not even three hours had passed, but already there were over one hundred Amish folks from the community standing around at the farm trying to get updates. The women had their arms around one another, and the men stood in close circles, their hands in their pockets, talking quietly. More were on the way—I could see them walking across the fields or arriving in horse and buggies.
The families of the girls were gathered in the farmhouse, mostly trying to find out which hospitals their girls had been taken to. Despite the fact that I grew up Amish, and still often dealt with members of their community, I was still amazed at how quickly they had come together to support one another. This is the Amish response to tragedy—quick, thorough, and overwhelming in the most positive sense. I suddenly felt an enormous warmth for them, as well as for my heritage, rise inside of me. If there is one thing you can guarantee about the Amish, it’s that they will not allow anyone in their community to suffer a tragedy on their own.
Soon I saw two older couples outside the farm. They were the grandparents of some of the girls who had been shot. I heard them telling some of those waiting outside that the parents were having trouble finding out which girls had been taken to which hospitals. When the medical helicopters had arrived and whisked the girls away, it had been nearly impossible to tell the girls apart due to numerous factors: the frantic nature of the scene, the number of victims, their similar age and dress, and the fact that the nature of their injuries meant it was difficult to describe their facial features. Eventually the hospitals would take digital photos of the girls, blacking out their injuries, and e-mail them to someone on the scene who passed the pictures on to the parents. Even then, some of the parents would go to the wrong hospitals.
I remember when I was a child and our neighbor’s barn burned down—the firemen fought the blaze all through the night and into the morning. Before they even finished hosing down the glowing embers, the local community was there, lumber for the new barn was delivered, and one of our Amish neighbors, serving as contractor, had the plans for a new barn out on the kitchen table. The men arrived later that day to begin building. The women arrived with more food than everyone could possibly eat, setting it onto rows of tables where we could all help ourselves. The staccato beat of a community’s worth of hammers sounded out all day, and the barn was rebuilt in no time. Many hands make light work, we always used to say.
As I got out of my vehicle and headed into the crowd, I felt two emotions very deeply: I was imagining, once again, what a long road these families had in front of them. But I was also surrounded by this sense of being in such a rich culture. Some of the things they were already doing are woven deep in them from birth: they had assembled like this so quickly, the men standing in one main area, the women grieving together in another; the parents and families of the girls, those most deeply affected, were protected in the confines of the house, surrounded by those closest to them, waiting to hear if their children had survived.
Still looking for Mike, I walked up to a group of Amish men. They stood in their work clothes, black trousers with suspenders over plain-colored shirts. Their beards were grown free but the hair above their top lips was shaved. They wore straw hats. Many just kept shaking their heads at the horror of what had happened only a few hours ago.
“Has anyone done anything to help you manage the media?” I asked no one in particular. I looked up again at the helicopters circling in the sky, pointing their cameras down at the Amish who had gathered, and it just didn’t seem right. It wasn’t how things should be. They are such a private people, and I felt they deserved the honor and dignity of some kind of space.
I’m not sure that the group of men understood my point. They certainly had no way of comprehending the media onslaught that was already on the way. I don’t think any of us did.
After a short conversation, we all stood around together, in shock. By this time they knew the shooter had been Charles Roberts. Most of them knew who he was—he served as milkman for many of the families in that area, including some of the families of the girls he had shot. There was profound confusion regarding why someone from inside their community would do something so unimaginable.
Just then I saw a media van driving up a dirt lane through the field, approaching the farmhouse. Suddenly it stopped, turned around, and drove back out. Then a lone news photographer began approaching, stopping every now and then to take some pictures before slowly advancing another twenty paces and taking some more. I kept watching him. I know the media need to do their jobs, but it seemed so intrusive that I was about to ask him to take a hike, but a state trooper did the job for me.
I didn’t even realize the police were there, but learned that one trooper was stationed in the house and two outside to keep the media at bay. Even with the volunteers blocking the incoming roads, the journalists somehow found their way through the maze of farm lanes and fields to the center of the tragedy.
The whole atmosphere felt so sad and empty. Questions hung in the air, as awkward as those helicopters; questions that many of the Amish may have felt uncomfortable with. Why? Why would this happen to such innocent little girls? What could have possibly caused someone to commit such a heinous act?
Through the rumor mill of the crowd I heard that some of the grandparents wanted to go to the fire hall, a mile or so up the road, to help figure out where each of the children had been taken, and I offered to give them a ride. Just before we left the King farm, the grandparents were giving details to the police to try to identify the girls: eye color, dress color if they could remember, hair color, birthmarks, height and weight, and other details. Once again I was hit by the innocence of these children as their approximate weights were given, some only fifty or sixty pounds.
I drove slowly down Mine Road toward the fire hall with two passengers in my car—by that time the road was reduced to one l
ane due to all the television trucks and vans—and passed White Oak Road, the street that led to the school. It was blocked by policemen. Through a few trees and over the corn I could see the schoolhouse with the truck driven by Charles Roberts still backed up to the front door where he had left it.
We continued straight on Mine Road, then made a short right toward the Bart fire hall. The grandparents thanked me for the ride and walked inside. I parked down the street, then followed after them, entering the already bustling fire hall.
First responders were straggling back into the hall looking exhausted and stunned by the morning’s events. Volunteers, some Amish, were serving food to them. The first responders’ eyes looked empty and sad, and I could only imagine what they had seen inside that schoolhouse.
Buggy passing a media horde
CHAPTER EIGHT
Think No Evil
I POURED MYSELF a cup of coffee at the Bart fire hall and took in the scene. The debriefings had started—groups of first responders were going into some of the side rooms and offices in the fire hall to talk about what they had been through. As counselors, we have seen a vast difference in the long-term emotional health of first responders who receive an initial debriefing and those who do not. I was not involved in any of the meetings that day, so I wandered around the fire hall, listening to any bystanders who just needed to talk.
I ran into Brad Aldrich while I was there. Brad is the executive director of the Family Resource and Counseling Center, which we had founded fifteen years prior. Brad started at the center as a counselor and grew into the position of director, where his roles included public relations and fund-raising. On that day, he had been at his office, looking over some paperwork and preparing for his individual meetings with other counselors. When he first heard the news, his mind couldn’t register the information. A shooting at an Amish school. Only miles away. Then came the blur of activity as the counseling center’s phones began to ring. Everyone in the center had questions with no answers: Which school? How far away? Was the shooter on the loose? Many of our counselors grabbed their coats off the backs of their chairs with the intention of driving to the scene to help, but Brad stepped in. They knew nothing about the shooter’s status or even if the scene was safe. He decided that two counselors would join him on a trip to find the school and the rest would remain at the center, wait for a report back, and handle the influx of calls into the center.
