The awkward encounter that began Amish school nightmare
By Sam Knight 
timesonline

(this article features somedetails I did not pick up on earlier...)

The man at the classroom door was wearing a baseball cap and holding a clevis, a U-shaped piece of metal with holes at each end. He asked the teacher whether anyone had seen one lying around in the road.

Emma Mae Zook, a 20-year-old teacher at the Georgetown Amish School, was put off by his manner — he stood close to her, talking quietly and would not meet her eye — but she stopped her German and spelling lesson and said that she and the children would look out for it.

Then Charles Carl Roberts IV turned around, walked to a pick-up truck parked outside and came back with a shotgun.

Ms Zook, describing the opening minutes of Monday's school shooting in the tiny village of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, told a local newspaper today that that was the moment she ran to a neighbouring farm to raise the alarm.

Interviews with Ms Zook, her relatives and some of the first emergency officials to arrive at the scene of the shooting have shed more light on the half-hour ordeal that ended with the shooting of ten Amish girls — the deaths of five — and the tearing up of the innocence and calm of one of America's most reclusive communities.

Several members of Ms Zook's family happened to be in her classroom when Roberts, a 32-year-old milk truck driver, appeared at the door. When he re-appeared for the second time, she told the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal that she made eye contact with her mother and they both ran.

Ms Zook's sister-in-law, Sarah, remained behind in the classroom and watched Roberts order a boy to chase the two women and tell them that he would start shooting unless they came back. 

The boy's sister, nine-year-old Emma Fischer, ran with him, an instinctive decision that probably saved her life. Their two older sisters were both shot by Roberts: Marian, 13, died, while Barbie, 11, remains in intensive care.

In the minutes that followed, Roberts sent out Sarah, her two young children, and a 21-year-old woman who is eight months pregnant. They stood, unsure what to do, outside the school as Roberts lined up the students against the blackboard. In time, the boys started trickling out of the room and the group started walking to the neighbouring farm.

That's when they heard "pounding" coming from the schoolhouse: the sound of Roberts nailing planks across the doors, shoving desks against the main entrance and, according to police, beginning what he intended to be a prolonged assault of the ten girls under his control.

But two state troopers arrived at the schoolhouse within minutes, followed by eight others, and in the midst of an attempt to make him talk to a hostage negotiator, Roberts started shooting the girls, all of them at close range, before killing himself.

Janice Ballenger, a deputy coroner of Lancaster County, was given the task of checking the dead. She examined Naomi Rose Ebersol, a 7-year-old girl who had died in a policeman's arms, in the school playground.

"She was a 7-year-old angel," she told the Intelligencer Journal. "Kneeling next to the body and counting all the bullet holes was the worst part."

Inside the classroom, "there wasn’t a desk or chair in the room that wasn’t covered in blood or broken glass", said Ms Ballenger. Among stickers of smiling faces and a sign that read "Visitors Brighten People’s Days", she declared Roberts, who had shot himself in the head, dead, and found the body of Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, by the blackboard.

Two other girls, sisters Lena and Mary Liz Miller, aged 7 and 8, died of their wounds in separate hospitals overnight. Four more remain in a critical condition.

Ballenger's fellow deputy coroner, Amanda Shelley, was also at the scene: "It was something that I never expected to see in Lancaster County. I realize that my job comes with seeing things that most people wouldn’t want to, but the experience has left me in a fog."