West Nickel Mines School shooting

• 1. Introduction

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  The West Nickel Mines School shooting began with a question about a missing part called a clevis pin. On the 2nd of October 2006, a man backed a pickup truck up to an Amish one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, a village in Bart Township, Pennsylvania. It was about 10:25 in the morning, soon after the children came back from recess. He asked the teacher, Emma Mae Zook, and her pupils whether they had seen the pin on the road. Survivors later said he mumbled and never looked anyone in the eye. The children told him no. Within the hour, ten girls between the ages of six and thirteen had been shot. The Old Order Amish community that lost them then drew national attention for the way it responded. Who was this man, and what had he planned? How did the morning unfold, minute by minute, while police gathered outside? And why did a quiet farming community answer such an act the way it did?

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• 2. The Milk Truck Driver

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  Charles Carl Roberts IV was born on the 7th of December 1973 and was thirty-two years old on the morning he drove to the school. He worked as a milk tanker driver, and his route took him to several Amish farms around Nickel Mines. Some of those farms belonged to the families of the girls he would later shoot. He lived in nearby Georgetown, an unincorporated area of Bart Township, with his wife, Marie, and their three children. That morning, at 8:45, the couple walked the children to a bus stop, and Marie then left. State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller later interviewed Roberts's co-workers. They described a change in him during the months before the attack. They also said he seemed to return to normal in the final week. Miller suggested that this calm might mark the time when Roberts settled on his plan. Neighbors, for their part, remembered his mood as unusually jovial. Five days earlier, a hostage crisis and shooting had taken place in Colorado, and investigators looked into whether the two events were connected. Marie came home from her regular Bible study group a little before 11:00. On the kitchen table she found four suicide notes, one for her and one for each of the three children. Roberts then telephoned her from the schoolhouse. He claimed that twenty years earlier, when he was twelve, he had molested two young female relatives. On the 4th of October, those two relatives told police that no such abuse had ever happened. In one note he wrote that the death of a daughter, about twenty minutes after her birth nine years earlier, had "changed my life forever." He added that since then he had been "filled with so much hate" toward himself and God. Back at the schoolhouse, the plan he had prepared was already underway, and the boys were being put to work.

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• 3. The Barricade

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  After the children said they had not seen a clevis pin, Roberts walked back to his truck. He returned to the classroom holding a Springfield Armory XD 9mm handgun. He ordered the boys to help carry items from the truck, and the load was long. It included lumber, a shotgun, a stun-gun, wires, chains, nails and tools. There was also a wooden board fitted with several sets of metal eyehooks. A small bag held a change of clothes, toilet paper, candles and flexible plastic ties. While the boys were busy, Zook and her mother, who happened to be visiting, slipped out and ran toward a nearby farm. Roberts saw them go. He ordered one of the boys to chase them, warning that he would shoot everyone if the two women got away. Using wooden boards, he then barricaded the front door. He lined the girls up against the chalkboard. At that point he let a pregnant woman, three parents carrying infants and every remaining boy leave the building, fifteen male students in all. Nine-year-old Emma Fisher also got out, though her older sister stayed behind. The women who had fled were by then reaching the farm of a man named Amos Smoker.

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• 4. Outside the Walls

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  Amos Smoker picked up the telephone at the request of the teacher and called 9-1-1 around 10:35. The call was recorded at 10:36. A second caller reported the incident at 10:41, and that call was passed to the State Police. Meanwhile, an Amish man from the same farm had set out with his two large dogs toward the schoolhouse. He crept along its windowless back wall and took a position beside a side window, hoping to find some way to help the girls. When the first patrol car came down the road without slowing, he ran to the roadway and waved it down. The trooper made a quick U-turn and parked. A later article described that as the last time anyone approached the building without being noticed. The trooper arrived at about 10:42, six or seven minutes after Smoker's call. Troopers used the public address systems in their patrol cars to tell Roberts to throw out his weapons and come out. He refused and demanded that the officers leave. County and state dispatchers made brief telephone contact with him as well. At 10:55, Roberts used his cellphone twice, first to call his wife and then to call police. He told the dispatcher that the children would die if state police were not off the property in two seconds. The dispatcher tried to stall and transfer him, but he hung up. By 11:00, a large crowd of officers, medical technicians and villagers had gathered near the school and at an ambulance staging area. Transcripts of the shooting-related calls were released on the 10th of October 2006, though Lancaster County could not supply those that had been handed off to the state police. Inside the building, two of the girls had started speaking up.

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• 5. The Final Minutes

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  Interviews after the attack made clear that every girl understood the danger. Some of them talked quietly with each other through the entire ordeal. Two sisters, Marian Fisher, who was 13, and Barbara Fisher, who was 11, asked Roberts to shoot them first so that the others might be spared. Their plea bought the group a little more time in which rescue might still come. At about 11:07, rapid gunfire began. State troopers moved in at once, and the first to reach a window found that the shooting had stopped. Roberts had killed himself. Investigators counted three shotgun blasts, one of them aimed at the troopers and missed. They also counted at least thirteen pistol rounds, followed by a last 9mm round fired into his own head. Barbara was wounded in the attack. Marian was killed.

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• 6. The Girls

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  Once police entered the schoolhouse, every wounded girl was taken to a hospital. Two had already died inside the building, and one was pronounced dead on arrival at Lancaster General Hospital. The survivors were stabilized there and then moved on to hospitals with pediatric trauma care. Three went to Penn State Children's Hospital, four to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and one to Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware. One child first flew by helicopter to Reading Hospital and Medical Center before reaching Philadelphia. Janice Ballenger, a deputy coroner in Lancaster County, counted at least a dozen shotgun pellet wounds on a single child before asking a colleague to take over. State Police Commissioner Miller later gave the State Police Medal of Honor to ten troopers. The Bart Township Fire Company presented commendations to local police and emergency personnel. The dead were named. Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7, died at the scene. Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, was declared dead on arrival at Lancaster General. Lena Zook Miller, 7, died at Milton S. Hershey Medical Center on the 3rd of October. Mary Liz Miller, 9, died at Christiana Hospital the same day. Four other girls survived their injuries. They were Rachel Ann Stoltzfus, 8, Barbara Fisher, 11, Sarah Ann Stoltzfus, 12, and Esther King, 13. A year later they had made measurable progress. Sarah Ann had lost some vision in her left eye but was back in school, though no one had expected her to live. Barbie Fisher was pitching in school softball after another operation to strengthen her right shoulder. Rachel Ann returned to school within months. Esther returned as well, then graduated and worked on the family farm. The sixth girl was Rosanna King, who was 6. She suffered serious brain injuries, was taken off life support at Hershey and was sent home at her family's request on the 4th of October 2006. She was said to know her family and to smile often, but she never again walked, talked or fed herself. Rosanna died on the 3rd of September 2024, aged 23, one month short of the eighteenth anniversary of the shooting.

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• 7. Forgiveness

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  On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered girls was overheard telling younger relatives not to hate the killer. "We must not think evil of this man," he said. Another Amish father remarked, "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God." Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, said that nobody around him wanted anything but to forgive and to reach out to the gunman's family. Within hours, an Amish neighbor had comforted the Roberts family and offered forgiveness, according to a family spokesman. Amish visitors called on Roberts's widow, his parents and his parents-in-law. One Amish man held Roberts's sobbing father in his arms, reportedly for as long as an hour. About thirty members of the Amish community attended Roberts's funeral. Marie Roberts was one of the few outsiders invited to a victim's funeral. She later wrote an open letter to her Amish neighbors. "Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need," she wrote. "Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you." Not everyone admired this response. Some commentators argued that forgiveness is out of place when no remorse has been shown. They warned that it risked denying that evil exists. The scholar Donald Kraybill and two colleagues answered that letting go of grudges is a deeply rooted Amish value. Amish memory holds up forgiving martyrs, including Dirk Willems and Jesus himself. In their view, giving up vengeance neither undoes the tragedy nor excuses the wrong. It is a first step toward a more hopeful future. Money followed the sympathy. The Amish do not normally accept charity, yet given the scale of the tragedy they took donations. Richie Lauer, director of the Anabaptist Foundation, explained that Amish beliefs rule out health insurance, so the gifts would likely cover the hospital bills of the injured children. The Nickel Mines Children's Fund was set up for the families of the girls who were shot. A separate Roberts Family Fund, also run by the Amish, supported his widow. By 2007, about $4.3 million had been donated to the children's fund.

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• 8. Rebuilding and Retelling

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  The West Nickel Mines School came down on the 12th of October 2006, ten days after the attack. Its site was left as a quiet pasture. A new one-room school, the New Hope School, rose at another location near the old one. It opened on the 2nd of April 2007, exactly six months after the shooting. Its builders deliberately made it as different from the original as possible, down to the style of the flooring. The attack remains the deadliest school shooting in Pennsylvania history. The story has since reached readers and viewers far beyond Lancaster County. Donald Kraybill, Steven Nolt and David L. Weaver-Zercher wrote the nonfiction book Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. The Lifetime Movie Network adapted it into a television film, Amish Grace, which premiered on the 28th of March 2010. It became the highest-rated movie in that network's history up to then. A stage work followed. The Amish Project, by Jessica Dickey, is a fictional account told in monologues. Its speakers include people from both the Amish world and the outside community that watched it unfold.

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