As Community Mourns, Amish Leaders Set up Fund for Killer’s Widow

The attention of the whole country has been focused on the small community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, all week, bringing the intense glare of the media spotlight to the traditionally private life of the Amish. Since Charles Carl Roberts took over a tiny one-room schoolhouse on Monday, killing five girls as well as himself, life in this bucolic little village has been anything but private.

Funerals for four of the girls were held Thursday, with local officials doing all they could to keep the media at bay. Reporters and photographers were blocked from the funerals and the burials, and airspace for 2.5 miles in all directions was closed to news helicopters. In recent years the Amish communities in Lancaster County have become something of a tourist attraction, despite their tradition of shunning the modern world and its conveniences. But Thursday was a day set aside for the Amish to bury their dead without the intrusion of the outside world.

State troopers blocked off all roads into the Nickel Mines village, as police cars led horse-drawn buggies and black carriages holding the handmade wooden coffins to the cemetery on a hilltop. Funerals were held for 13-year old Marian Fisher, 7-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersol and sisters Mary Liz Miller, 8, and Lena Miller, 7. The funeral of 12-year old Anna Mae Stoltzfus was held Friday morning. Five other girls who were shot remain hospitalized, in critical or serious condition.

Amish funerals are conducted in German, and are different from most funerals in that there are no eulogies. The services focus on God, not on commemorating the dead. Ministers read passages from the Bible and an Amish prayer book, and there is no singing. The girls, wearing white dresses made by their families, were placed in simple wooden coffins and laid to rest in graves dug by hand. On their way to the cemetery, the funeral processions passed right by the home of the man who killed the girls.

The attack was so shocking and traumatic to everyone in the village that there has been talk of tearing down the schoolhouse. The memories of the attack by Roberts, a 32-year-old milk truck driver who interacted with these quiet people every day, would likely be too much to bear for students having to return to the schoolhouse.

One Amish woodworker who lives a few miles away from the schoolhouse said that although the families of the girls are saddened by the tragic events, they will be sustained by their faith. "We think it was God’s plan, and we’re going to have to pick up the pieces and keep going," said Sam Stoltzfus. "A funeral to us is a much more important thing that the day of birth because we believe in the hereafter. The children are better off than their survivors."

Despite the horrific tragedies inflicted by Roberts, the Amish have reached out to embrace his relatives, offering support and forgiveness. Roberts’ wife, Marie, was invited to attend the funeral of Marian Fisher on Thursday. Donors from around the world have been sending money to a fund set up to help the families of the dead and wounded. The donations have ranged from $1 to $500,000, to help families with the mounting medical bills. Amish leaders in the community have requested that a fund also be set up for Roberts’ widow and three children.

Tragedies such as these killings in the Amish schoolhouse, the school shootings last week, and the Columbine massacre, usually capture the world’s attention and become times of national mourning, due to satellite and television coverage of unfolding events. But this week’s tragedy has given the world a glimpse of the faith and forgiveness of a small community who, instead of being consumed with anger, filled their hearts with compassion to reach out and embrace the family of the man who killed their children.