Amish stoically endure scars of massacre

One girl is confined to a wheelchair and fed through a tube, but she rewards family members with smiles. Another recently underwent nerve surgery to improve usage of her shoulder and arm. A third girl has caught up in school despite persistent vision problems from a head wound.

As the anniversary of the West Nickel Mines Amish School massacre approaches, the committee organized to handle donations to the community yesterday released a heart-felt statement on the anguish and progress experienced since the Oct. 2 tragedy that left five girls dead and five others wounded.

"To the casual observer 'life goes on' in Nickel Mines, with its daily and seasonal demands of work, school, births, family and church," wrote the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee, a nine-member panel of Amish and non-Amish leaders. "But for the families each day brings with it the pain, grief and questions that remind them of their loss."

The group said that no public memorial events were planned on the anniversary, but that the school built to replace the scene of the shootings will close for the day.

"The Amish just aren't accustomed to doing much by way of memorials and monuments," Herman Bontrager, spokesman for the committee, said in an interview yesterday. The panel was organized two days after the shooting and still meets in the Bart Township fire hall.

The families "do a lot of talking with each other, almost like a 'living memorial' concept," said Bontrager, an insurance executive in New Holland, Lancaster County. "It's not that they ignore the issue. Among themselves there will be lots of visitation on that day."

In the months after the killings, more than $4.3 million in donations poured in from throughout North America and numerous countries, the committee said in its statement.

About one-third has been spent on medical, therapeutic, transportation and living expenses for the victims and their families, the group said. Funds have been placed in a trust account to pay for the girls' long-term needs.

The Amish also have donated to the charity funds of medical providers and to service organizations that assisted on Oct. 2.

Additional funds were spent to construct the New Hope Amish School a mile from the now-razed West Nickel Mines school where gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, also killed himself. Roberts, a local milk-truck driver, left a note explaining that he was tormented by the death of his infant daughter in 1997 and by the 20-year memory of having sexually molested two young female relatives, a statement investigators could never substantiate.

The new one-room school has added security features - locks, brick rather than wood construction, and a "panic bar" on the front door. It opened on April 2.

In a gesture of forgiveness and compassion, the Amish made a donation to Marie Roberts, the widow of the gunman and a mother of three young children.

Bontrager said Roberts has remarried and relocated to a nearby community. Because of the move, there has not been ongoing contact between her and the Amish families, though "nobody is trying to avoid that," he said.

Despite intense outside interest, the close-knit Amish have not discussed their experience publicly and have mostly kept their grief to themselves. But with the anniversary approaching, the statement said, the families of the injured wanted to provide an update on their daughters "to the public from whom they received generous support, emotionally and financially, this past year."

Students started the 2007 school year the week before Labor Day, with some new children in the class and the same teacher as last year, according to the report. After teacher Emma Mae Zook escaped the Nickel Mines school, Roberts let all 15 male students go, along with a pregnant woman and three adults with infants. One 9-year-old girl slipped out with them. The other girls were then tied up and shot at close range.

"The children are reported to be enjoying their classes, but they keenly miss the girls who died," the committee wrote.

To help them cope with the trauma, the families and others are using counseling services, the report said. Some of the boys are struggling with survivor's guilt, Bontrager said.

"It's difficult for all of the children. But they are also living fairly typical and normal lives, with the farm and work and home life and play and so forth, and that's what the families are really trying hard to do - provide stability and continuity for their children," he said.

Four of the five injured girls have been in school since December. The fifth, Rosanna King, who was 6 when she was shot, suffered a severe head injury and is unable to talk. She uses a reclining wheelchair and is "totally dependent on her family members for personal care, mobility and feeding by tube," the statement said.

"The doctor did not give us any hopes at all for survival, so at 8:30 [on the night of the shooting] they took the breathing machine off, thinking she would soon pass," her family said in a recent update to the church community. "A couple times that night and the next couple days we thought we were losing her. By Friday she was a little more stable."

Now Rosanna "smiles a lot, big smiles" and recognizes her family, the Kings said.

A second severely injured victim, Barbie Fisher, recently underwent reconstructive surgery to improve her shoulder and arm. A third girl, Sarah Ann Stoltzfus, suffers impaired vision on her left side from a head wound. Her older sister, Anna Mae, was killed in the attack.

Sarah Ann's therapists and her brain surgeon at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia "all said it's a true miracle that she recovered as fully as she did, which we thank God for," the Stoltzfus family reported in the statement.

"We also know that healing is not always as complete as we would wish for everyone, but we do know that God is with us in all things," the family said.

The Nickel Mines committee said that reaching out to others in similar circumstances has been part of the healing for the Amish families. A group of them recently traveled to Blacksburg, Va., to meet with Virginia Tech officials and families affected by that deadly school shooting and to deliver a "comfort quilt," the statement said.

"Through shared suffering and pain, in shoulder-to-shoulder labors of love, in mutual respect despite differences," the committee wrote, "the people of Nickel Mines are bearing each other's burdens as they seek solace and healing in their terrible loss."

To read the statement issued by the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee on the approach of the one-year anniversary of the Amish schoolhouse shootings, go to http://go.philly.com/

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