Pa. Amish community grieves, forgives

updated 10:06 p.m. ET Oct. 5, 2006

GEORGETOWN, Pa. - Scores of horse-drawn buggies from across the Pennsylvania countryside clip-clopped past the home of the schoolhouse gunman to a wind-swept, hilltop graveyard Thursday as the Amish buried four of the girls killed in their classroom.

In a doleful scene that looked like a 19th-century tintype, hundreds of Amish — boys and bearded men in wide-brimmed hats and dark suits, women and girls in long black dresses and black mourning bonnets — stood near a huge mound of earth for the brief graveside services.

The daylong series of three funeral processions took the coffins past the home of Charles Carl Roberts IV, the 32-year-old milk truck driver who laid siege Monday to the girls’ one-room schoolhouse in an attack so traumatic that the building may soon be razed to obliterate the memories.

Benjamin Nieto, 57, watched the processions from a friend’s porch.

“They were just little people,” he said of the victims. “They never got a chance to do anything.”

Pennsylvania state troopers on horseback and a funeral director’s black car with flashing yellow lights cleared the way for up to four dozen buggies, including black carriages carrying the hand-sawn wooden coffins of 7-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersol, then 13-year-old Marian Fisher, then sisters Mary Liz Miller, 8, and Lena Miller, 7. The funeral for the fifth girl, Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, was scheduled for Friday.

Killer’s wife invited to funeral
The killer’s widow was invited to one of the funerals Thursday, according to a Roberts family member. But it was not immediately known if she attended. Roberts was well-known around the community because his milk pickup route took him to many Amish dairy farms.

The girls, in white dresses made by their families, were laid to rest in graves dug by hand in a small burial ground bordered by cornfields and a white rail fence. Amish custom calls for simple wooden coffins, narrow at the head and feet and wider in the middle.

Slide show   Tragedy in Amish community A religious community grapples with the tragedy of a deadly schoolhouse shooting that left five girls and the gunman dead.

To protect the privacy of the Amish, all roads leading into the village of Nickel Mines were blocked off for both the funerals, which were held in the families’ homes, and the burials. Airspace for 2½ miles in all directions was closed to news helicopters.

Tragedies such as the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado have become moments of national mourning, in large part because of satellite and TV technology. But the Amish shun the modern world and both its ills and conveniences, including automobiles and most electrical appliances.

“I just think at this point mostly these families want to be left alone in their grief and we ought to respect that,” said Dr. D. Holmes Morton, who runs a clinic that serves Amish children.

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