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Amish school killer’s mission of madness
Oct. 3, 2006
Dave Goldiner
www.columbusdispatch.com
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In the pickup truck he carried the plastic ties to bind the girls’ ankles, the wooden boards he would use to barricade the doors of the tiny schoolhouse — and an arsenal large enough to hold off an army of cops and carry out the children’s executions.
Driven by a grudge that he had nursed for two decades, Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, brought an hour of unimaginable terror to a tiny Amish community before he callously shot 11 terrified girls, most of them in the head.
Two young students, along with a female teacher’s aide who was slightly older than the students, died on the blood-streaked schoolhouse floor while eight others were left fighting for their lives.
It was the nation’s third deadly school shooting in less than a week.
One of the girls died in the arms of a grief-stricken state police trooper who could do nothing to stop the carnage.
“He split them up, males and females,” said Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller, who choked up as he described the slaughter. “He bound the females at the blackboard, and apparently executed them.”
Roberts also killed himself.
He was “angry at life, he was angry at God,” added Miller.
Police gave no specifics about Roberts’ perceived grudge against young girls, except that it stemmed from his own childhood 20 years ago.
The gunman was not Amish and apparently had no hatred for the insular community, known for old-fashioned clothing and horse-drawn buggies.
He apparently targeted the West Nickel Mines Amish School, which had about 25 to 30 students, ages 6 to 13, because it was near his home in the farmland an hour west of Philadelphia, there were girls there and no security, Miller said. The school had about 25 to 30 students, ages 6 to 13.
Before embarking on the mission of madness, Roberts left rambling notes to his wife and three children that Miller said were “along the lines of suicide notes.”
He also called his wife during the siege to tell her he was getting even for a long-ago offense and “would not be coming home,” Miller said.
“Our hearts are broken, our lives are shattered,” his wife said in a statement released by a friend. “We grieve for the innocence and lives that were lost today.”
The violence erupted on a balmy fall day in Paradise, Pa., amid a landscape of rolling hills, country roads and bountiful farms in Pennsylvania’s picturesque Lancaster County.
The West Nickel Mines Amish School serves a hamlet of about 300 descendants of a centuries-old religious sect that rejects many trappings of modern life such as cars, computers and telephones.
“This is the last place on Earth that something like this would happen,” said Raymond Bial, an author who has written about the Amish.
Nothing seemed unusual when Roberts, a milk-truck driver, walked his three kids to their school bus stop yesterday morning and returned home to plan his rampage.
After writing the notes to his wife, Roberts tossed a few 2-by-4 and 2-by-6 boards in his truck along with the ties he would use to bind the girls.
He also brought a 9mm. semiautomatic pistol, a 12-gauge shotgun and a rifle, along with a bag of about 600 rounds of ammunition, two cans of smokeless powder, two knives and a stun gun.
After backing his truck up to the schoolhouse, Roberts walked in and confronted some of the two dozen students about 10 a.m.
Within 30 minutes, he had separated the boys from the girls and sent the boys out, along with a pregnant woman and three women with infants.
A teacher who managed to escape ran to a nearby farmhouse and dialed 911, but police didn’t get their first alert until 10:48 a.m. There are no phones in the tiny school, and the Amish teacher does not carry a cell phone, police said.
Roberts apparently called his wife about 11 a.m., saying he was taking revenge for an old grudge, Miller said. Moments later, Roberts told a dispatcher he would open fire on the children if police did not back away from the building. Within seconds, troopers heard gunfire. Frantic police troopers, unable to get in through the schoolhouse doors, smashed windows to get inside to find the heartbreaking scene.
He apparently had gunned down the girls as they stood against the blackboard, where just minutes earlier they had taken lessons.
Stunned by the violence, Amish men in broad-brimmed straw farmer’s hats and women in white bonnets embraced outside as lines of troopers hunted for clues and bullet casings. The horse-drawn buggies were parked amid the crush of police cars.
Three girls, ages 13, 8 and 6, were rushed to Penn State’s Children’s Hospital in Hershey, Pa., where they underwent surgery. They were listed in critical condition. Three others were taken to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The victims included an 8-year-old girl with neck and arm wounds, a 12-year-old shot in the arm and leg, and a 10-year-old shot in the head.
The shootings were disturbingly similar to an attack last week at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., where a man singled out several girls as hostages in a school classroom and then killed one of them and himself.
Miller said he doesn’t think the Pennsylvania attack was a copycat crime: “I really believe this was about this individual and what was going on inside his head.”
Miller said investigators were looking into the possibility the attack may have been related to the death of one of Roberts’ own children. According to an obituary, Roberts and his wife, Marie, lost a daughter shortly after she was born in 1997.
The White House announced yesterday that the Bush administration will host a conference next week to discuss the recent string of school violence and what can be done to stop it.
It was not clear whether President Bush would attend.
This story was written for the New York Daily News. Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.
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