by Jonas Beiler
When Brad first saw the schoolhouse it was a blaze of activity: what seemed like hundreds of state patrol cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and all of their associated personnel surrounded the small building. Brad noticed that the King farm, about a half mile off in the distance, seemed to be the center of activity for the Amish, so he drove in that direction. He parked his car along Mine Road and walked up the lane toward the farm, wondering what he would encounter. At this point Brad knew very little about what had actually happened. He only knew there was a gunman. He had no idea if anyone had been shot or, if she had, how badly injured anyone might be.
When he spoke with the Amish families mingling outside of the farmhouse, none of them yet knew the full events. There were whispers of a hostage situation. A man with a gun. But everything was still rumor, and not much news was coming from the school, or from the families still waiting in the farmhouse.
As more ambulances and fire trucks arrived, and the helicopters began to circle, the mood at the farm grew increasingly somber. Amish men stood closer together and their voices took on hushed tones. The name of Charles Roberts began to circulate. Perhaps one of the freed boys recognized him from his milk route. Everyone tried to figure out why someone from their own community would do this. Did someone know of any arguments or disagreements he may have had? Was he a violent man by nature? Had he ever done anything strange before? Again, too many unanswered questions left the gathering crowd feeling helpless and despondent.
Even Brad became more and more reflective as he wandered around the yard. Clouds of dust swept across the harvested cornfields as fire trucks and ambulances screamed down Mine Road and helicopters hovered toward a landing area between the farm and the school. Autumn leaves blew across the dirt lane and crunched under Brad’s feet. As he looked down the farm lane he saw the boys from the schoolhouse, the boys whom Charles had released.
Their first stop after being released from the school was just behind the outhouses beside the school. They didn’t want to leave their fellow classmates, but couldn’t go back inside, so they waited there. The Amish are a deeply religious community, so even those young boys began praying for their sisters and friends. Soon the police arrived and quickly ushered them across the field to safety. Then, in the maelstrom of the scene and the rising concern for the remaining students, they were left, forgotten for a moment.
This is when Brad found them.
The Amish boys sat in one long, straight line along the farm lane. Brad wondered if they had been there when he arrived—if so, he had walked right by them without even noticing. It would have been easy to miss them. They sat quietly, perfectly still, staring at the blue sky, the fields, the dirt lane, not saying a word.
There were about twelve boys and one girl, ages five to twelve; the boys all had their elbows on their knees, some with their faces in their hands. Their eyes had that wide-open look, a mixture of fear, confusion, and sadness. There was nothing for them to do, so they sat there quietly, waiting, frozen in place.
Brad saw a group of what appeared to be fathers standing around up the lane a bit, so he approached them.
“Hi,” he said quietly. “I’m Brad Aldrich from the counseling center. Would it be okay with you if I went over and had a word with the boys for a couple of minutes?”
The men nodded their heads, some of them looking relieved and appreciative, so Brad made his way over to the boys and sat down in the grass with them. He asked them how they were doing. He got a few names. He asked them about school and other things that Amish boys their age would talk about. Brad had no idea what had just happened or what these boys had seen, so he was just opening lines of communication.
As Brad continued to chat with the kids, something suddenly clicked in his mind: Where were all the girls? There was one little girl sitting with the boys, but he was pretty sure that a school that size would have more than just one girl.
Some of the older boys began hinting more and more at the events in the school: the man had a gun, they were scared, and the younger kids were confused, even more so than the older ones. Brad began to sense that they had seen something pretty horrible and, in the simplest of terms, tried to help them understand what they might be feeling or thinking.
“You might have a knot in the pit of your stomach, or you might feel sick. You might feel very tired, or you might not feel different at all, for a little while. It’s okay.”
Mentally he began evaluating each of the children for signs of shock. As the seriousness of the incident became clear, he wondered how they were even functioning.
The sun was getting hot, so Brad suggested that they go get some water and something to eat. He knew they must be holding a lot inside and wanted to reassure them somehow.
“You do what you want to do, okay?” Brad told the children. “If you want to go play, go play. If you want to take a nap, take a nap. If you want to sit quietly, that’s okay.”
As the children vanished into the crowd of Amish, Brad was approached by two state policemen.
“Where did you just send those kids? We’ve been waiting for an hour to talk to them about what happened.”
“Don’t worry,” Brad said quietly. “They’re just getting some lunch. They’re only kids. They might need a little space right now. They’ll be right back.”
Once the police were on the scene it didn’t look like Brad would be able to speak to the boys any longer, so he decided to drive over to Bart fire hall, the staging point for the fire and ambulance crews. He knew there would be more people in need of help over there.
But as he headed for the fire hall, he couldn’t get that picture out of his mind: the line of boys sitting quietly along the dirt lane. It was yet another example of the community’s innocence coming under fire, the fact that those boys had to go through the terror of that morning. Brad wondered how the Amish would respond to such a direct assault on their children.
When Brad walked into the Bart Township fire hall the first thing he noticed was how quiet it was, especially considering there were at least one hundred people milling around. A few standing on the room’s fringes watched the news broadcasts on small televisions, but it seemed that more of those present were avoiding the news. The images being broadcast around the world were ones they had just seen firsthand, and they didn’t need to have them reinforced or projected into their minds from yet another angle.
The film crews were not allowed in the fire hall, but during his short drive over Brad had traveled through a line of countless media vans and reporters. This is really a huge story, he thought to himself after seeing the multitude of news cameras pointing their lenses at the school. Brad still knew very little about what had happened in the schoolhouse. He knew there had been a gun. He knew shots had been fired. That was it.
Then the debriefings started. Those who had been involved on the scene were invited to the Bart fire hall to talk with counselors about what they had seen and how it had affected them. The counselors then told them what they might expect to encounter over the coming days and weeks, both emotionally and physically, and what they could do to cope with it. When Brad met with the Christiana ambulance crew, Vietta and Samantha, he suddenly encountered the horror that had unfolded in the school. They spoke bluntly about gruesome injuries—shots to the head, massive blood loss, gaping wounds. Brad began getting a sense of what these people had seen, and felt a heaviness for them.
Later in the day Brad found himself sitting with a paramedic who had been forced to make some difficult calls regarding treatment. When he walked in for his debriefing he still had dark red flecks all over his stethoscope, and his shirt had larger red stains. He looked beaten up, both physically exhausted and emotionally spent.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever had to make these kinds of decisions about who gets treated and who doesn’t,” the man sighed to Brad. “I actually had to say, ‘Don’t bother treating that one, she’s not going to make it, we have to focus on saving the others.’ Don’t get me
wrong, I’ve seen death before, but at most it’s usually four people in a car accident and there’s enough of us to help out all four of them. Even if one of those four isn’t going to make it we still do what we can. But there just weren’t enough of us. We couldn’t work on all of the girls. I had to make some pretty tough decisions.”
The man’s head dropped and he stared at the floor, his shoulders sagging.
By the time Brad left the fire hall, the street was completely lined with news vans and satellite dishes. There wasn’t room for one more vehicle in their midst, and still more stations were arriving, literally from around the world, parking at the end of the line, dragging their cables into neighbors’ houses, and plugging in. Correspondents stood shoulder to shoulder, conveying the horrible news in somber tones and serious looks. Cameramen swiveled quickly to catch a shot of a passing buggy. They zoomed in for a shot of Amish people walking through the fields or of the square plot of land holding the schoolhouse, by then cordoned off with yellow police tape.
Brad and his staff drove slowly through this traffic back out to the King farm and counseled the women who had been in the school when Charles entered. There were still over fifty Amish people at the farm. Brad spoke with some of the men mingling around outside—cousins, uncles, and other extended family. They spoke about the events of the day, and about the line of media trucks now completely lining the road from the farm to the corner by the auction house.
You would think that such an invasion of television cameras and trucks with satellite dishes perched on their roofs would be intimidating to the Amish, but at that point the Amish response to the media was mostly favorable—they were glad the word was getting out so that people could pray for them. One of the Amish families had missionary friends in Africa who called them that afternoon because they saw the news coverage. They were amazed at how the media were helping them to connect with friends from around the world.
Brad also asked some of the older Amish men for guidance on how he should represent their community to the media. How should he answer their questions about the shooting, about the Amish faith, and about their community? The Amish response was mostly unified on this—as long as it was getting out the word of God, and bearing positive witness to their belief in Christ, then they were all for it.
One of the Amish men came over to Brad toward the end of the evening. His eyes were tired from a long day of crying and looking for hope. Without even speaking, the expression on his face seemed to say, “Now I have seen everything.” There was also an underlying current of unease about him. Soon Brad discovered the source.
“I don’t even want to ask the question ‘why?’ ” he said to Brad. “But I still wouldn’t mind knowing.”
The look in the man’s eyes reminded Brad of earlier in the day, when he had debriefed bystanders, some of the Amish neighbors who had been on the scene, and a few firefighters, all together in one group. The atmosphere in the room had been subdued, and when someone spoke, everyone had listened intently. Some of the voices sounded soft, like a dulled edge, while others were constantly catching with emotion.
One of the Amish men in the meeting raised a question.
“Do we know why he went to this school instead of one of the four other schools close by?”
“Not yet,” Brad had said.
Brad could sense everyone mulling that question in their own minds, the randomness of the act, the possibility that it could have been their own child’s school.
A few of the men commented about Charles Roberts—they were not hateful comments, but mostly probing questions wondering how someone could do what he had done. There was some anger, some frustration, and a lot of sadness. Toward the end of the discussion one person in the group, who was not Amish, said to the Amish men, “It should be a relief to you that he’s dead, he’s gone, and he’s not going to do this again.”
Silence filled the room.
In any typical post-shooting environment, this statement would most likely be accepted and even amplified: “Yeah, good riddance!” Most of us, quite naturally, would be relieved that someone who had committed such a horrible atrocity was no longer around. In a close-knit community such as Nickel Mines you would think that people would be thankful they wouldn’t have to relive the incident with a trial and that they would never have to see this man alive again.
That’s not how the Amish think.
Brad could see it on one Amish man’s face, how inappropriate he found that comment. The man didn’t say anything, but his jaw clenched in disagreement, and his eyes looked pained.
This Amish man’s first response was not to look for relief or to be thankful for some apparent working of cosmic justice where the evil man gets what he deserves—his first response was forgiveness and a longing for reconciliation. For the first time that day, Brad felt the overwhelming nature of Amish forgiveness. Brad knew the Amish were a peaceful people, but when he saw the hurt in that man’s eyes, genuine hurt for Charlie’s death, he understood just how far their forgiveness would go. In the days to come we would learn more about specific acts of forgiveness demonstrated by the Amish toward the family of Charles Roberts, but already the media were seeing something different in this story compared to other tragic shootings: an absence of malice toward the shooter or his family. The press began to arrive even as the girls were being carried from the schoolhouse and stayed to cover the aftermath of this event. They understood the grief that they saw in the Amish, but they were not prepared for the overwhelming and universal display of concern for the Roberts family. Word had leaked out that an Amish neighbor went to the home of the shooter that very night to let his wife know that they bore no hard feelings toward her or even her husband. There was even talk going around that the families of the ten little girls wanted to meet with the Roberts family to express their forgiveness.
I LEFT the fire hall that evening at about the same time Brad was finishing up his debriefings at the farm. I believe I was experiencing what everyone in the community was experiencing: shock, disbelief that something like this had happened so close to home, and sadness for the girls and their families. The night was closing in and the air was getting cool. I was driving home, thinking about the day and about my daughter Angie when my cell phone rang.
I looked down at it, feeling tired and not wanting to talk unless it was Anne or one of my girls. To my surprise, the caller ID on my phone said “NBC.” I realized that a good friend of mine with connections in the media had given my number to some different folks who were looking for someone to interview. I guess because I was a counselor, grew up Amish, and still had connections to the Amish community, I was an ideal person to talk to. I answered my phone.
“Ann Curry would like to come to your house and get a statement about forgiveness,” said the person on the phone.
It was at that point that I started to realize how interested the rest of the world was in the unique response of the Amish to the tragedy that had found its way into their midst. I don’t know if I had consciously thought about it before that call—a forgiving response is programmed into the Amish, so it didn’t seem remarkable to me in the least. I knew that folks from outside our area would be intrigued when they saw how the Amish dressed, or how they traveled in their buggies, or how their lifestyle of simplicity didn’t include modern conveniences. But I hadn’t thought about how their quick forgiveness would command such an immediate and extensive audience.
“Sure,” I said, “come on over.”
As soon as I got off the phone with them I called my wife.
“Just thought I should let you know that Ann Curry from NBC is coming over tonight,” I said.
“No, she’s not,” my wife said in disbelief.
“Yeah, she is. In fact she’ll be over in about thirty minutes.”
What struck me the most about our brief interview was how quickly Ann Curry zeroed in on forgiveness. Once again I could see that theme rising to prominence, like a bright red thread winding its way
through a white carpet. To this day, the irony almost makes me smile: I think of how most Amish had probably never heard of Ann Curry, yet their Christian message of radical, nostrings-attached forgiveness brought her from New York City to Nickel Mines so that she could tell the rest of the world about it.
The media clearly realized that something different was going on. There was an element to this tragedy that didn’t follow the normal script. The first thing that garnered the public’s attention was the Amish’s refusal to hold a grudge of any kind against Charles’s family:
In just about any other community, a deadly school shooting would have brought demands from civic leaders for tighter gun laws and better security, and the victims’ loved ones would have lashed out at the gunman’s family or threatened to sue.
But that’s not the Amish way.
As they struggle with the slayings of five of their children in a one-room schoolhouse, the Amish in this Lancaster County village are turning the other cheek, urging forgiveness of the killer, and quietly accepting what comes their way as God’s will.
