(Sunday, October 2, represents the five year anniversary of the day that a heavily armed man walked into a one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and opened fire - killing five young girls and wounding others.  I was less than five miles from the school house when the shooting occurred.   This is my personal account.) 

 On a bright sunny day in early October, 2006, a truly crazy and mixed-up man – a man full of demons - walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Bart Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  He carried two guns and a knife, and in his car he had duct tape, lubricant, lumber and tools.

Just hours before, he had sent his own three children to school on the bus.  Returning from the bus stop, he wrote a rambling, confused note to his wife, packed a borrowed truck with tools, food, lumber, toilet paper and ammunition - plenty of ammunition - and then drove to the school and backed quietly up to the door. 

•     •     •

The sky that morning was beautiful – bright, cloudless, autumn, innocent – just like on September 11.  The blue sky was everywhere.  I worked at a rural soil lab not more than five miles away and on my way to work I passed the familiar plodding Amish buggies, bare-foot girls on scooters and young boys with wide brimmed hats carrying Wal-Mart lunch boxes to school.  I always drive the back roads.

Around mid-morning I left work to run some errands.  As I was out I could hear sirens in every direction; groups of police cruisers passed at high speed, heading rapidly south.  “Must be some accident…”, I remember thinking to myself.  In the sky I saw two helicopters – the small darting ones that are favored by news stations and the State Police.  I assumed that there must be a spectacular accident on Hwy. 30, which ran parallel not far away.  There’s nothing else out there.

•     •     •

Locally it was known as Nickel Mines, a quiet place where two back roads intersect, lost deep in the brown rustling October corn of Amish country.  Around twenty students were at the school at the time, ranging in age from very young children to teenagers.  A collection of teachers and teacher’s aides included a pregnant woman and three women with infants. 

In all likelihood, the students had all come in recently from playing baseball, their cheeks still rosy from the exercise. It seems that Amish kids play a lot of baseball, at least that’s the impression one gets while traveling the silent pavement east of Lancaster, south of Leola.

The selection process was simple.  He told the boys, the pregnant teacher and the three women with young infants to leave.   But the 11 young girls were ordered to remain.  He selected them and bound them.  He likely had other, more devious plans in mind, but was thwarted when authorities arrived on the scene.  He was trapped, so he shot them.

It’s impossible to imagine the horror inside that schoolhouse.  Those girls must have been terrified.  What could have prepared them for this?  What in their training and upbringing, what in their daily thoughts, what in walking to school that day could have prepared them for standing before the familiar chalkboard of their lifelong school, bound at the ankles and being gunned down, one by one.

The first reports were simply that there had been an incident at a one-room Amish schoolhouse nearby and that students had been shot.  Very soon however, new sources reported that the entire school had been massacred; and then word that there were in fact a few survivors…  And finally, thankfully, a news blackout took effect while they sorted out the details.

It took awhile. 

The collective thought around America was “Good God, if Amish children aren’t safe in their own schools, then who is?”  But deep down we’ve all come to realize that if there are crazy people out there bent on doing us harm, there is little we can do.  We saw it on September 11, we saw it at Columbine and Virginia Tech.  It was all too familiar, we see it every evening on the Nightly News.  We were seeing it again at Nickel Mines.

•     •     •

There was a funeral a few days later.  The sun had disappeared and the skies were murky.  The Amish turned out in numbers I didn’t realize existed.  They came in polished buggies and their finest clothes, heading mournfully, stoically, towards Nickel Mines.  Even the children, especially the children, wore world-weary looks upon their faces.  I was in a line of north-bound commuters that day, heading out the back roads for jobs in Leola and New Holland, headlights on, driving at the speed of a buggy – partly out of respect for the endless procession of black buggies moving southward and partly out of shame for what the craziness of our society had visited upon theirs.

The perpetrator was dead.  In one final act of self-denial he splattered his own brains against the blackboard and the ordeal was over - at least the physical ordeal – although the mental ordeal had just begun.  The Amish community caught the attention of the entire world when they banded together to forgive the murderer and attended his funeral in support of the shocked and grieving widow. 

The people who survived this horrible episode have largely recovered, as much as anyone can recover from something like this, although one young girl, now eleven years old, is doomed to suffer from the effects of traumatic brain injury for the rest of her life.  The wife moved away in shame, the commuters and the buggies continue to ply the back roads.  The school house was quietly torn down and the blood-stained land plowed under. 

•     •      •

Around these parts, you know that summer is over when the Amish put their shoes back on.  Soil-stained toes that have spent an entire summer wiggling free in the rich soil of Lancaster County are stuffed back into socks and boots where they are forced to jostle with each other for room.   Another sure sign is the groups of identically dressed Amish children walking down the edge of back country roads, returning to the simple one-room classrooms that dot the countryside

It is autumn now, five years later.  The shoes are coming back on and the harvest is in full swing. The sky is again blue like it was on 9/11 and the children have returned to school.  But things have changed.  Although the children still run on the playgrounds with innocent abandon, many of the tiny one-roomed school houses now have fences and shuttered windows.  And the black bonneted young women who serve as teachers gaze just a little bit longer over their shoulders when a car slows on the road.

 © Jeff L. Howe, September 2011, story and photo, all rights