Amish school shooting

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question

Postby anotherdrew » Thu Oct 05, 2006 1:37 am

Nemo (or anyone) - ever hear of the woman at Penn State (state college, pa) who early one morning fired a good number of rifle shots from 'the lawn' into the buildings across the street? woulda been 95-03 time frame. I've never found a news story about it, but I think she killed at least one person. She was in the army reserve I think. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: timing

Postby anotherdrew » Thu Oct 05, 2006 1:46 am

if they were MCed perhaps these human time bombs were triggered accidently, they weren't meant to all go at once (and by all I mean only some, there must be a few random copycats mixed in). Perhaps something they assumed would never happen unplanned was the trigger, something like, the president being called the devil on tv news. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: timing

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Thu Oct 05, 2006 2:12 am

Of course, this Suddenly-Snapped-Mass-Shooting-Syndrome is a huge problem in Europe, too.<br><br>Uh, wait a minute....no, it's not. <br><br>Hmm. Now why is that? Just what is different about the USA?<br><br>I think Michael Moore's best film was 'Bowling for Columbine' which explored exactly this question. <br><br>He found that the history of racism, poverty, and corrosive media were synthesizing into a violence-prone country unlike any other. <br>Well, <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>unlike Canada</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, anyway, which had the same predelection for guns but very different media and social attitudes. <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=hughmanateewins>Hugh Manatee Wins</A> at: 10/5/06 1:54 am<br></i>
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Re: rain's comment, gendercide, US wars

Postby starviego » Thu Oct 05, 2006 3:23 am

Hugh, <br><br>Very intersting about NATO. Some of the people who were watching the news of Columbine as it broke swore they saw a military truck on the scene with the letters "NATO" on it. And a commercially available video shows an unidentified colonel and major general in military fatigues on site.<br><br><br>AnotherDrew,<br><br>You're thinking of Jillian Robbins, 19, Penn State U, State College, PA, 9-17-96, 1 dead, 1 wounded<br>--when she was arrested, she answered repeatedly, "I don't know." when asked why she brought school violence back to PSU. <p></p><i></i>
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Shootings in PA

Postby johnny nemo » Thu Oct 05, 2006 3:21 pm

Here again, it could be a PSYOP.<br>The timing is certainly interesting.<br><br>But the point that I'm trying to make is that, while this may have happened in a "sleepy lil town", it occured in a state with a long history of gun violence.<br><br>Be it the "Paxton Boys", who went out and massacared Indians in the hundreds in 1763 <br><br>to Sylvia Seegrist, who went on a shooting spree at the Springfield Mall in 1986 and killed three people<br><br>to the skinheads who killed their parents near Allentown<br><br>to the pizza bomber <br><br>to Jillian Robbins<br><br>to Ronald Taylor, who on March 1st, 2000 shot and killed three white men and injured two others in a rampage through the Wilkinsburg business district in Pittsburgh<br><br>to Richard Baumhammers, who less than two months later, on April 28, went on a shooting spree near Pittsburgh that left 5 people dead.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Through the first week of May of this year, there were 383 shootings in Philadelphia. During that same time period, 106 homicides were recorded.<br><br>383 shootings in a week!</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>Here's the really bizarre thing.<br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>There was a school invasion and massacre in PA in 1764!</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>On July 26, 1764, four Delaware (Lenape) American Indian warriors entered a log schoolhouse of white settlers in what is now Franklin County, Pennsylvania, near present Greencastle. Inside were the schoolmaster, Enoch Brown, and twelve young students. Brown pleaded with the warriors to spare the children before being shot and scalped. The warriors then began to tomahawk and scalp the children, killing nine or ten of them (reports vary). Two children who had been scalped survived.<br><br>A day earlier, the warriors also encountered a pregnant woman, Susan King Cunningham, on the road. She was beaten to death, scalped, and the fetus was cut out of her body and placed next to her.<br><br>The incident was called the Enoch Brown School Massacre.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> </em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=johnnynemo>johnny nemo</A> at: 10/5/06 1:24 pm<br></i>
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Re: Shootings in PA

Postby rain » Fri Oct 06, 2006 10:09 am

Killer's wife is invited guest at first Amish funeral<br>By BARRY WIGMORE<br><br>In a ceremony made more heartbreaking by its centuries-old simplicity, four little girls were buried yesterday as the Amish of Pennsylvania turned the other cheek. <br><br>With television and newspaper cameras kept at a distance, and police helicopters enforcing a no-fly zone overhead, one of the few non-Amish guests invited to the funeral of seven-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersole, the first little girl to be buried, was Marie Roberts, the killer's wife. <br><br>With tears in her eyes, Mrs Roberts sat in the back of one of the 34 black horse-drawn carriages that were part of the funeral cortege behind Naomi's horse-drawn hearse. <br><br>On the way from the church to the hilltop cemetary, the procession passed Mrs Roberts' home where her husband, Charles, loaded up his guns before heading for the little village school on Monday. <br><br>As usual in times of crisis, the deeply-religious villagers of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, turned inwards for support yesterday with prayers before, during and after each of the three ceremonies. <br><br>Like the other three children who were buried - the oldest, Marian Fisher, 13; and sisters Mary Liz Miller, eight, and Lena Miller, seven - Naomi was laid to rest in a simple wooden casket, narrow at the head and feet and wider in the middle. <br><br>Each ceremony was attended by around 500 mourners. Services were also held throughout the day for non-Amish mourners at a church in the nearby town of Correyville. <br><br>The funeral of a fifth girl, Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, is being held on Friday. <br><br>As Marian Fisher was buried yesterday, it was revealed that she had bravely begged Roberts to kill her, but release the other children he held at gunpoint. <br><br>Leroy Zook, had seven close relatives in the school when Roberts broke in: his wife, two daughters - one of them the teacher - two daughters-in-law, and two baby grandchildren. All escaped unharmed. <br><br>Standing in the drive of his family farm, Mr Zook, wearing braces and a straw hat with a black paper band around the brim, said: `The oldest girl there, Marian, she said, "Shoot me, and leave the others alone." But he ignored her.' <br><br>Mr Zook was among the many Amish villagers who also rallied behind Mrs Roberts and her three children. Within hours of the shootings, it emerged yesterday that a neighbour knocked on the Roberts family's door to pray for them and extend forgiveness. <br><br>Another neighbour, Daniel Esh, a 57-year-old Amish artist and woodworker whose three grandnephews were inside the school during the attack, said: `I hope they stay around here. They'll have a lot of friends and a lot of support.' <br><br>Community leaders said that Mrs Roberts and her children may even receive money from a fund established to help victims and their families. <br><br>Although the Amish do not usually accept help from outside their community, even shunning social security payments, Kevin King, executive director of Mennonite Disaster Services, an agency managing the hundreds of thousands of dollars already sent in, quoted an Amish bishop: `We are not asking for funds. <br><br>In fact, it's wrong for us to ask. But we will accept them with humility.' <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Meanwhile, police said the truth about the reason for Roberts' mad rampage probably died with him. In a brief phone call to his wife seconds before opening fire on his victims and then killing himself, Roberts said he was tortured by memories of how he had molsted two girls, aged four or five, 20 years ago when he was 12. <br><br>But the girls, now in their mid-20s, told police they were 'absolutely sure' that he had NOT molested them.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> State police spokeswoman Linette Quinn said: `We will continue to investigate and try to determine what other motive there may have been.' Also yesterday, a six-year-old girl, one of the five critically-injured survivors of the attack, was taken off life-support after her family was told she was brain-dead. <br><br>Dr Holmes Morton, who runs a clinic for Amish children, said the girl's family wanted to take her home to allow her to die in peace, surrounded by her loved ones. <br><br>Dr Morton said: `These families want to be left alone in their grief and we ought to respect that.' <br><br>Author Gertrude Huntington, who has written a book about Amish children, said: `The people know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent. And they know that they will join them in death. `The hurt is very great. But they don't mix hurt with hate.' <br> <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=408830&in_page_id=1770">www.dailymail.co.uk/pages...ge_id=1770</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2006/10/amish051006_228x327.jpg" style="border:0;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br><br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=rain@rigorousintuition>rain</A> at: 10/6/06 8:16 am<br></i>
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Re: Shootings in PA

Postby rain » Sun Oct 08, 2006 7:04 am

GEORGETOWN, Pa. (AP) - Dozens of Amish neighbours turned out Saturday to mourn a quiet milkman who killed five of their young girls and wounded five more in a brief, unfathomable rampage. <br><br>Charles Carl Roberts, 32, was buried in his wife's family plot behind a small Methodist church, a few kilometres from the one-room schoolhouse he stormed Monday. <br><br>His wife, Marie, and their three small children looked on as Roberts was buried beside the pink, heart-shaped grave of the infant daughter whose death nine years ago apparently haunted him. <br><br>About one-half of perhaps 75 mourners on hand were Amish. <br><br>"It's the love, the forgiveness, the heartfelt forgiveness they have toward the family," said <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Bruce Porter, a fire department chaplain from Morrison, Colo.,</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> who went to Pennsylvania to offer what help he could and attended the burial. <br><br>"I broke down and cried seeing it displayed." <br><br>He said Marie Roberts was also touched. <br><br>"She was absolutely deeply moved, by just the love shown," Porter said. .....<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=2fc566c1-9c5f-4444-ac5a-b950e41a2513&k=75443">www.canada.com/topics/new...13&k=75443</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>is it just me, or are things still a little weird in PennSylvania ?<br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=rain@rigorousintuition>rain</A> at: 10/8/06 5:08 am<br></i>
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Re: Amish school shooting

Postby elfismiles » Sat Nov 28, 2015 3:35 pm

My son, the mass murderer: ‘What did I miss?’
In 2006, Charlie Roberts walked into an Amish school in Pennsylvania and killed five young girls. His mother talks about trying to comprehend his actions
Terri Roberts … ‘I was – always will be – his mother. Surely, if anyone could spot signs of trouble it would be the woman who gave birth to him.’ Photograph: Zachary Roberts
Joanna Moorhead
Saturday 28 November 2015 01.00 EST Last modified on Saturday 28 November 2015 04.23 EST


Terri Roberts was at the theatre where she worked when the call came. It was her husband, Chuck. Terri should come straight away, he said, to their son Charlie’s house. Terri knew instantly, from the tone of Chuck’s voice, that it was serious. She didn’t ask questions, just ran to her car. And it was on the short drive that she turned on the radio and heard for the first time about a shooting incident that morning at a school in a nearby town.

Several children were dead, the report said, and the perpetrator was a man named Roy. Terri suspected immediately that the killings were connected with Chuck’s call. “I knew straight away that the school they were talking about was very near the place where our son Charlie used to park the milk van he drove,” she says. “I was imagining all sorts of dreadful things, like that he had been killed while helping to rescue some of the children. I knew he’d have helped them if he possibly could.”

Terri thought she was imagining the worst: in fact, the worst would turn out to be infinitely more appalling. When she arrived at Charlie’s house the first people she saw in the driveway were Chuck and a police officer. She remembers what happened next as if it was in slow motion.

“I said to the officer, ‘Is my son still alive?’

He said no.

Then I turned to Chuck, whose eyes were sunk deep into his face, and he said to me: ‘It was Charlie. He killed those children.’”

The next few hours were a blur to Terri. She remembers the initial disbelief, the feeling that it was utterly impossible that her lovely son, her quiet, deep, complicated but loving son, who had three young children of his own, could possibly be responsible for such an unthinkable tragedy. Hadn’t she heard the name Roy on the radio? And then, as it gradually dawned on her that what Chuck had told her must somehow be true, and that the Roy mentioned on the radio had simply been a mistake, she remembers falling to the floor and lying there in a foetal position, and howling. Just howling.

In many ways, the most extraordinary part of Terri’s story is that she isn’t metaphorically on that floor howling still. The details of the slaughter for which her son was responsible for are hard to write, hard to read and almost impossible to imagine or to begin to understand.

Here are the facts: on the morning of 2 October 2006, Charlie Roberts, carrying a gun, walked into the classroom of an Amish school near his home in Pennsylvania. He ordered the boys to leave and, half an hour later, shot 10 of the girls before turning the gun on himself. Five died: the youngest two were seven, the oldest was 12. Two of them, Lena and Mary Liz Miller, aged eight and seven respectively, were sisters. Five more girls were injured, including six-year-old Rosanna King who was initially not expected to survive and who has severe brain injuries.

How do you begin to understand that your child has been responsible for a tragedy of this magnitude? Like Eva Khatchadourian, the mother of the killer in Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, Terri has combed through every detail, every nuance, every memory, every clue, to try to work out what in her eldest son’s past could have made him walk into that schoolhouse that day. “What did I miss?” she asks in her newly published book. “I was – always will be – his mother. Surely if anyone could spot signs of trouble it would be the woman who gave birth to him. At what point did bitterness begin to seethe beneath the surface contentment? Or hate tug harder at the mind and heart than love?”

Terri with her husband, Chuck, and their four sons: Zachary, left, Charlie, back row, Josh, front right, and baby Jon Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Terri with her husband, Chuck, and their four sons: Zachary, left; Charlie, back row; Josh, front right; and baby Jon.
As a mother, she says, she cannot stop loving her son – and as she unravels his story – the ordinary story of an ordinary boy in an ordinary town whose life ended so violently – you feel she is doing what any parent can and must do, even in the face of odds as great as these, which is to see the very best in her child, to give him the benefit of every doubt, to put every tale in the most sympathetic light. Yet, when she has finished describing how sweet a baby he was, and how he had to cope with being born with club feet, and his learning difficulties, and the loss of his first child soon after her birth, the question hangs in the air between us, and Terri is brave enough, through her tears, to name it and answer it herself. “I ask myself, were these things related to what happened? But the truth is that plenty of people in the world have experienced extreme pain and suffering, and have coped with it. They didn’t go on to commit terrible crimes like Charlie did.”

After the murders, a note was found in which Charlie confessed to having sexually assaulted two young female relatives 20 years earlier and said he was still haunted by it. Yet, says Terri, police investigations never found any evidence that what he had confessed to had, in fact, happened.

Looking back, she can see that Charlie was always quiet as a boy. “But I have a husband who is quiet and another son who is quiet. It’s not unusual for men to be quiet.”

Could there really have been no sign that Charlie was disturbed at a very deep level? Terri is adamant that there were not. “After it happened, I got together with his best friend and we talked. He said, ‘I never saw anything in Charlie that would have brought him to anger or resentment. It just wasn’t there …’ The only thing I can say is, he obviously masked hurt deeper than I could ever have imagined. So yes, as a mother I wish – how much I wish – I had drawn him out more. If I have any message for other mothers, it’s this: if you have a child who is quiet and reserved, especially when hard things happen, it’s worth reflecting with them to see if there’s anything deep that needs to come to the surface.”

The truth is, and Terri knows it, that whatever terrible things were going on inside Charlie, they were probably too deeply buried for anyone else to access. “Somewhere in my son’s life he experienced some kind of pain that he internalised and never shared with anyone. He internalised something so painful that it opened up a door for evil. Something grabbed hold of him that was so dark and so deep.”

Terri is a Christian – she raised Charlie as a Christian – but since the tragedy she has had some big questions. “I’ve said to God, I simply don’t understand how you could let it happen. You could have given his car a flat tyre. In the end, I’ve had to admit that there can be no understanding. I’ve chosen to trust God because there’s nothing else I can do. I have no understanding of why.”

Of course, there have been times when she has burned with anger at Charlie. How, she asks in her book, could he have done this? “How could he … leave his wife a widow, his children fatherless? Leave them to face the shame and the horror? And the gentle Amish families he had come to know so well in his rounds collecting milk. What darkness and evil could so possess his mind that he would want to hurt them? To rip away daughters as precious as his own? To inflict such pain and loss on another living soul?”

Charlie Roberts as a boy. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Charlie Roberts, aged 13.

After the shooting, and especially in the early days afterwards, Terri was acutely aware of how she, as Charlie’s mother, and the whole of their family, was being judged and seen by others. “It was scary,” she says. “Knowing we were being labelled. In some ways it was harder for Chuck than for me – he’s a retired police officer. He even has the same name as Charlie, so when he was showing his driving licence or something, people would do a double take and he’d have to say, ‘Yes, that’s right, I’m the father,’”

Even going out shopping, or anywhere in public, meant they would be looked at, pointed at, blamed. Then something truly extraordinary happened – something that injects a glimmer of hope and faith and goodness into a story that is otherwise laced with horror and heartache.

He obviously masked hurt deeper than I could ever have imagined. I wish – how much I wish – I had drawn him out more
Charlie’s funeral was difficult for his parents and his wife, Marie, to organise: what undertaker, after all, would want to handle the burial of a man so loathed? Eventually, though, it was arranged. The family braced themselves for a media barrage. As they walked through the churchyard, Terri remembers, she could see the telescopic lenses trained on them. “We felt vulnerable – we knew everyone was looking at us. Then, from behind a shed, a group of Amish people appeared, men in tall hats and women in white bonnets. They fanned out into a line between the graveside and the road. They were protecting us from the media.”

There was more. “When the service ended, these people came forward, these lovely people whose eyes, like mine, were red with tears. The first ones to approach us were Chris and Rachel Miller, whose daughters Lena and Mary Liz had both died in their arms. And they said to me: ‘We are so sorry for your loss.’

“There are no words to describe what it feels like when people who have suffered so much at the hands of your son reach out and say something like that, says Terri. “It was an amazing thing to know that through their suffering they wanted to comfort us.”

Forgiveness, she says, is a choice. “These sweet parents were still as grief-stricken as I was, their hearts broken like mine over the loss of their children. But they had chosen to forgive instead of hating – to reach out in compassion instead of anger.”

As time went by, there were further opportunities for Terri to connect with the Amish community and one day a chance came to visit Rosanna, the little girl who had pulled through, but with brain damage.

“I felt a need, a motherly need I guess, to connect. It was about two months afterwards, and I was invited to the house. They welcomed me in and gave me a seat next to Rosanna who was there in her wheelchair. She was so sweet and she had been so disabled; it was quite an emotional experience. I managed to hold myself together while I was there, but when we left I just started to bawl. To know that my son was responsible for this …”

There were more visits to Rosanna’s family and eventually something even more incredible happened. Terri noticed that the family – who also had three young sons – found it difficult to eat together because someone had to be with Rosanna, so she asked whether she could help by looking after her while the family ate. For several years she went once a week and, these days, still visits regularly, even though she is no longer in good health. “I had breast cancer some years ago and now it’s in my lungs,” she says.

She will go on visiting Rosanna, now 16, for as long as she can. “She is very dear to my heart,” says Terri. “She’s become almost like a granddaughter.”

In the end, she says, there are no words to describe what happened, just as there is no explanation. But if the shooting in the Amish school that day represented the unthinkable, then what has taken place since seems to represent what might be called a miracle.

• Forgiven: The Amish School Shooting, a Mother’s Love and a Story of Remarkable Grace by Terri Roberts is published by Baker Publishing, £9.99

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... did-i-miss


Expert predicted 'cluster' of school shootings
Post by Pissed Off Cabbie » 05 Oct 2006 01:10
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=8764

Gouda » 04 Oct 2006 16:38 wrote:
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/10/03/am ... index.html

Pennsylvania schoolhouse killer Charles Carl Roberts IV told his wife he molested young relatives 20 years ago and was dreaming about molesting children again, police said Tuesday.

Former Rep. Mark Foley was molested by a clergyman when he was between the ages of 13 and 15, his attorney said Tuesday amid allegations that the congressman exchanged inappropriate e-mails and instant messages with teen congressional pages.
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10 ... index.html

The crime bore some resemblance to an attack on a high school in Bailey, Colorado, where a 53-year-old man took six girls hostage and sexually assaulted them before fatally shooting one girl and killing himself.

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/10/04/am ... index.html

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