Four of Five Amish Shooting Victims Are Laid To Rest in Hand-Dug Graves

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The New York Sun

GEORGETOWN, Pa. — In scenes of quiet dignity, four of the five victims of the schoolroom killing of Amish children were laid to rest yesterday in an area of southern Pennsylvania called Paradise.

State police riders led a long line of black horse-drawn buggies out of the small settlement of Nickel Mines, Pa., to accompany the body of Naomi Rose Ebersole, 7, to her grave. When the procession arrived in neighboring Georgetown, mourners with impassive faces framed by black hats and white bonnets stared out from within their cabs.

Georgetown was home to Charles Roberts, the killer who barricaded an Amish school on Monday, tied up its female pupils, then murdered five and seriously injured five more.

His former neighbors lined Route 896 in an expression of solidarity with the bereaved. Amish elders requested that the funeral ceremonies take place away from the public eye. Security was tight with police snipers posted in the village and at checkpoints.

Later in the day, the scenes were repeated with the bodies of sisters Mary Liz Miller, 8, and Lena Miller, 7. The last funeral of the day was to be that of Marian Fisher, 13. The fifth victim, Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, is to be buried today.

Amish funerals are simple events. Vots, or oral invitations, are extended by the bereaved to those attending the ceremony.

The mourners assembled in their buggies or arrived on foot. After a prayer session at home, the bodies were removed for burial. In a cemetery at the top of a small hill, graves had been dug by Amish men on their knees, clawing at the earth with their hands.

One Amish man, Sam Stoltzfus, 63, said his faith honored the dead above the living. “A funeral to us is a much more important thing than the day of birth because we believe in the hereafter. The children are better off than their survivors.” Doctors at Penn State Children’s Hospital took one victim, Rosanna King, off life support overnight.

The 6-year-old was taken to her home, overlooking the school where the massacre had taken place. Doctors said it was likely Rosanna would die.

As the funerals got under way, fresh doubt was cast on the killer’s claims that he was driven by guilt. In suicide notes, Roberts, a 32-year-old milkman, said he had abused two family members 20 years ago. After interviewing the women, police report that neither could recall any molestation.

Psychologists said anger, not guilt, was a more likely explanation. “This is an adult killing helpless, vulnerable children. Clearly this was suicidal. Apparently, he wanted to make a statement to show how angry he was,” a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Sadoff, said.

Roberts also wrote of his unending anger at the loss of a prematurely born daughter, who would have been 9 this year.


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