While still enduring effects of shootings, Amish also reach out to console others.
Acid corrodes the container that holds it.
That's what happens when we hold on to bitterness.
- Amish farmer from Nickel Mines, Pa.
BART TOWNSHIP, Pa. - Christ King leans back hard against the weight of his daughter's wheelchair, lowers her with gentle thumps down the porch steps, and pushes her across the garden into the shade of a maple tree where a stranger waits.
"Hello, Rosanna!" the stranger says cheerily. He is Richard Egan, a 72-year-old retired fund-raiser from Northeast Philadelphia.
The girl looks up at Egan, her hazel eyes wide and surprised. He wears city clothes, large 1980s smoky glasses, and two days' growth of gray bristle.
She smiles and her voice erupts in strained bursts.
"I think she's trying to say hello," Egan says. He shakes his head in awe, then whispers, "She's so pretty."
Rosanna's blond hair, freshly shampooed and so fine it is almost translucent, has been brushed back and braided. The purple trim on her wheelchair matches her handsewn dress. Her thin hands and her feet, covered in short black socks, curl like a cat's paws.
"You're lucky," Christ (pronounced as in Christopher ) King says, taking a seat on a white plastic chair beside his wife, Mary Liz. "She's having a good day." The week before, Rosanna had a series of violent seizures, 13 in all.
Five years ago, on Oct. 2, when she was 6, Rosanna was tied up along with 10 of her Amish classmates in their one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines. Charles Roberts, a local milk-truck driver, opened fire. He slaughtered five and then killed himself. Rosanna was shot through the head.
In the days, months, and years that have followed, the community's response has moved the nation and the world.
A rural enclave in Bart Township, Nickel Mines has become a shining moral symbol, a living monument to grace under duress and forgiveness in the face of evil.
For Old Order Amish, a Christian sect that values simplicity and humility, the landslide of attention that followed the tragedy posed an intense challenge.
Christ King says, "Most of the journalists behaved well" and respected his neighbors' requests not to be photographed. But as word spread that the stricken families had reached out to Roberts' relatives, attended his funeral, and shared donations with his widow, the community's compassion became as newsworthy as the violence that prompted it.
Over the last five years, these families have become emissaries of forgiveness, traveling to other states and hosting international visitors. This widening of their world has helped them heal as they offered consolation and advice to others.
There were 26 children in the school that day and several adult visitors. On the blackboard Emma Mae Zook, the teacher, had written, "Visitors bubble up our days."
When Roberts arrived with a 9mm gun and ordered the boys to help him unload his truck, Zook fled to a neighbor's house to call for help. The school had no phone.
Inside, while Roberts struggled to close the window shades, Emma Fisher, 9, heard a voice telling her to run, and she escaped.
Roberts tied up the 10 remaining girls, told them to lie on the floor, and ordered the boys out. Eleven were leaving their sisters behind.
One of the visitors, Lydia Mae Zook, 22, the teacher's sister-in-law, tried to soothe the sobbing child beside her, 7-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersole. Roberts, realizing that Zook was pregnant, allowed her to leave. (A week later, she gave birth to a girl she named Naomi Rose.)
According to Donald Kraybill, an authority on the Amish and co-author of Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy , Roberts said he was angry with God and needed to "punish some Christian girls to get even with him."
The father of three young children, Roberts said in suicide notes that he had never recovered from the death of his infant daughter years before. He also said he was haunted by guilt for having sexually abused two relatives. (No substantiating evidence has ever been found.)
In Roberts' cache of lumber, guns, wires, chains, nails, and tools, investigators discovered K-Y jelly and theorized that he was planning a sexual assault. But police responded so quickly he did not have time.
In his last phone call to his wife, Roberts said: "I'm filled with so much hate towards myself, hate toward God."
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