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Amish struggle for peace a year after school shooting

A year ago, this sleepy farm community was barely a blip on the map. But all that changed on Oct. 2 last year, when a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse and killed five girls and wounded five others.

Though grateful for all the help and sympathy it has received, the Amish community is hoping to be left alone as much as possible during the one-year anniversary of the shootings today. The Amish practice a simple, rural lifestyle free of most modern conveniences.

The New Hope Amish School, the one-room schoolhouse that replaced the one torn down after the attack, will be closed and there are no plans for a public memorial or commemoration, in keeping with the Amish way of life.

It was about 10:30am a year ago when Charlie Roberts, a milk truck driver from a neighboring village, showed up at the door of the Amish school an hour's drive west of downtown Philadelphia.

Roberts carried firearms, tubes of sexual lubricant and the hardware he thought he might need to lock himself inside West Nickel Mines Amish School and immobilize his victims.

In a horrifying attack that unfolded over the ensuing 40 minutes, the 32-year-old son of a police officer would shoot 10 girls, killing five, and then kill himself with a shot to the forehead from his 9mm handgun.

In a brief cellphone conversation with his wife and in suicide notes he left behind, Roberts indicated he was angry with God for the death of his infant daughter in 1997 and riven by the guilt of having molested two girls 20 years earlier.

Roberts left behind a puzzling trail of evidence that authorities today find as senseless as the day the attack occurred. He had no criminal history, had never been treated for mental illness and there seems to be nothing to substantiate his claim of having molested his two relatives decades earlier.

Amid the chaos and heartbreak, the Amish instinctively reached out to Roberts' widow Marie, the three children he left behind and his parents.

Even before their own five daughters had been buried, the victims' families were showing Roberts' family kindness, condolence and compassion.

About half the 75 mourners at Roberts' graveside were Amish, including family members of victims, and the Amish later designated a portion of the millions in donations they have received to benefit Roberts' children and widow.
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