“The heartache is still there. I take one day at a time.”



Aaron Esh Jr is only 23, but he carries the weight of the terrible events of a day 10 years ago. On 2 October 2006, in a one-room school house deep in Pennsylvania Amish country, he was the oldest student present. A local man burst in, tied up 10 girls and shot them.

Five died and five survived.

For a long time, Esh wrestled with himself, tormented by the idea that he could somehow have saved his classmates. He still struggles with the memories.

There have been many mass shootings across America in the 10 years since the shooting in the tiny village of Nickel Mines, some with much higher death tolls. But the Amish school shooting still strikes a chord. The attacker preyed on the most innocent and defenseless members of a determinedly bucolic and pacifistic religious community. Within hours, the Amish announced they had forgiven him.

This week, families whose children were at the school that day held a special picnic to mark the 10-year anniversary. First responders also attended. On Sunday, Christ Stoltzfus will visit the grave of his daughter, Anna Mae, who was 12 years old when she died. She is buried in a local cemetery, with the other girls who were killed.

“It will be comforting, but also painful,” he said.

Another of Stoltzfus’s daughters, Sarah Ann, was shot but survived. She is now “a healthy 18-year-old” who has recovered well, he said.

None of those affected by “the happening”, as the community calls it, have left the tight-knit community or the Amish faith itself, Stoltzfus said. Their old-world way of life has not changed. The Amish still eschew cars and do not rely on phones, factors which meant that 10 years ago, news of the shooting was slow to reach parents.

But the inhabitants of Nickel Mines do now have closer relationships with outsiders, after so many came to their aid. And in the aftermath of other mass shootings, especially those at Virginia Tech and at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, bereaved and despairing families have turned to the Amish for advice.

Even so, there are effects that linger and details of the event that have never been well understood.

‘We still wonder: why did it happen?’

Aaron Esh Jr sat in his gas-lit family kitchen. From outside came the sound of rain and horse-drawn carriages on a country road. In all directions, the rolling landscape was dotted with grain silos, cornfields and barns.

“Everyone is doing pretty well, for the best part,” Esh began. “But we still wonder: why did it happen?”

Despite the Amish’s legendary powers of forgiveness, he said, it was a struggle to stay constant. “You have to fight the bitter thoughts,” he said.

Public accounts usually summarize how Charles Roberts, 32, a non-Amish local resident, entered the school house on a Monday morning, and how after the teacher fled to find help, he ordered all the boys to leave and then shot the girls. But Esh’s father, Aaron Esh Sr, said survivors had told how, as Roberts brandished a pistol, he ordered all the children to lie down at the front of the class, below the blackboard. Not just the girls.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A group of women talk to officials at a police line at the intersection of Mine Road and White Oak Road, on 4 October 2006. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

When Roberts began tying the girls up and pulled down the window shades, Esh Sr said, children began weeping with fear.



“The boys were terrified, too,” he said, rubbing his ample beard.

Just before he barricaded himself and the girls inside, Roberts let the boys go. Aaron Jr went outside, then panicked because his little brother Joel was still inside. Joel, then seven, was the last boy out. Seven minutes after the teacher raised the alarm, state troopers arrived.

It is believed Roberts planned to sexually molest the girls during a lengthy siege. He told them, survivors said, that he was angry at God because his baby daughter had died despite his prayers. He also said he had molested two young female relatives when a teen, a claim that was never proven. When the troopers came, he fired at each of the 10 girls, then shot himself dead.

The community convulsed in shock and grief. The boys had a lucky escape, so everyone said. But they themselves were traumatized.

“Aaron had survivor’s guilt,” said his father. “He lost his childhood that day. It bothered him and other boys that they had not done something. Some of them are still struggling with that, 10 years on.” In the months afterwards, he said, his son “always had a fear that it would happen again”.

Within days, the community knocked down the school house. In April 2007, Esh Sr said, when they had just finished building a new school and moved the surviving children there, “Virginia Tech happened”. In Blacksburg, Virginia, a disturbed student killed 32 students and members of staff. Many in Nickel Mines were distressed all over again.

He couldn’t control what had happened in his life … but there was something he could control and that was what he ate Aaron Esh Sr, on his son

“That hit Aaron real hard,” Esh Sr said.

Aaron Jr’s mother, Anna Mary, said her son became very good at cooking for the rest of the family, but ate nothing himself.

“We couldn’t get him to eat,” she said.

Aaron Jr went through a growth spurt that winter, growing from 5ft 1in to 5ft 6in, but his weight dropped from 120lb to 90lb. “He was completely anorexic. He was like a toothpick,” Esh Sr said.

The boy would come home early from school, having panic attacks. Like most of the survivors and bereaved, he and his brother accepted counselling from outside professional therapists. But Aaron Jr was depressed. In the summer of 2007, he ended up in a secure hospital ward, close to death from starvation. He spent many painful months recovering, the family said.

“The only way it was explained to us was that he couldn’t control what had happened in his life that day, but there was something he could control and that was what he ate,” Esh Sr said.

Aaron Jr said that around that time, three state troopers came to visit him. They sat outside on the porch, he said, and told him what happened at the school was not his fault. If he had tried to intervene, they said, the outcome would probably have been a lot worse.

“It meant so much to me to hear it from them,” he said. “It saved my sanity. If it hadn’t been for that I don’t know how I would have handled it. At one point I had had thoughts of suicide.”

Then he smiled. He hopes to have a wife and children one day, he said, but he currently has “no plans” and is taking “one day at a time”. He works in the construction industry.

‘Shoot me first’

Two years ago, Barbara Fisher, now 20, got married. Ten years ago, she was shot multiple times in the shoulder and hand. Her younger sister Emma, then nine, was the only girl who managed to escape the school room before the shooting started, quietly walking out while Roberts struggled with a faulty window shade. Their older sister, Marian, was killed. She was 13.

Barbara, known as Barbie, later said that in the petrifying minutes that Roberts stood over the girls, holding a gun and talking about taking revenge on God, Marian said: “Shoot me first.” Barbie followed, saying: “Shoot me second.” Anna Mae said: “Shoot me next.”

Talking on Thursday on their sprawling dairy farm, where they raise 40 cows on pasture, corn and alfalfa and also grow tobacco, the girls’ parents, John and Linda Fisher, said no one had been able to figure out exactly what Marian meant. At the time, Marian was widely held to have displayed superhuman courage, in an attempt to protect the younger girls. Now, the truth remains a mystery. John Fisher said Barbie had said her sister’s face was full of distress, not stoicism, when she spoke.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People walk near the schoolhouse in Nickel Mines on 4 October 2006. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Marian should not be thought of as more special than any other child caught up in the events of that day, the Fishers said. They also said the decision by the community to forgive the killer and his family was not as simple as it has been seen to be.

“It’s not a once and done thing,” said Linda Fisher. “It is a lifelong process.”

As a principle, forgiveness is closely adhered to by the Amish. But it takes a while for each person’s emotions to catch up with such an outward decision, John Fisher said. When he saw the wounded girls fighting for their lives in the hospital, he was angry.

“That’s when it hit me,” he said. “As a father, I felt helpless.”

Both parents agreed it was “a huge relief” that Roberts did not go through with his planned sexual assaults. If he had lived, they said, they would have wanted justice served – though not the death penalty.

Steven Nolt, a professor of history and Anabaptist studies at the region’s Elizabethtown College and co-author of the book Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy, said the decision to forgive the killer would have been collective and about “giving up the right to revenge and grudges”.

“The essence of Amish life is about giving up,” he said. “Giving up self to the group, to God. From how one dresses to the kind of work one does, Amish life is shaped by rituals of self-surrender.” The Amish did not want to be thought of as saintly, he said, nor as “stoically stuffing their feelings into a box”.

On the day of the killings, members of the Nickel Mines community took food to Roberts’ widow. Six days after the shooting, families who had just buried their daughters attended Roberts’ funeral. Money from funds that poured in from around the world was diverted to the killer’s family, even though many victims faced huge medical bills.

Aaron Esh Sr said the bereaved parents started to look at forgiveness as “the one good thing that can come out of this tragedy”. With Roberts dead, he said, there was nowhere for the anger to go. There had been no foreshadowing of his ghastly act. He was known only as a loving husband and father, a good neighbor.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A procession of Amish carriages moves through Georgetown during the funeral of Anna Mae Stoltzfus, on 6 October 2006. Photograph: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

The Amish believe that harboring anger and resentment is corrosive. “It will eat you up,” Esh Sr said. Forgiveness, he said, “is so ingrained in our heritage that it’s part of our character”.

Terri Roberts, the gunman’s mother, has become a friend to many of the Nickel Mines families who were affected by what her son did. She is invited to gatherings and often visits Rosanna King, who was six when Charles Roberts shot her. She is confined to a wheelchair, unable to talk and fed through a tube. She has seizures.

Esh Sr and others met with families bereaved at Virginia Tech and at Sandy Hook, where 20 children and six staff were killed in 2012.

“Terri Roberts rode in a bus with us to Sandy Hook and the families and teachers there could not believe that we would even associate with her, let alone that she would come up there with us,” he said.

It took me a few years until I could feel that I really meant it inside me, to forgive Charlie Christ Stoltzfus

Christ Stoltzfus recalled the shock of the day 10 years ago when he, like the Fishers, had to deal with the news that one of his daughters was dead and one wounded. He too chose to forgive.

“But you see,” he said, “it’s a journey. I still made that immediate choice in principle. But it took me a few years until I could feel that I really meant it inside me, to forgive Charlie.”

At the point when he did find the compassion, he said, “I felt a great weight falling off me. I felt lighter.”

That feeling does not arrive if you forgive merely out of obligation, he said.

Aaron Esh Jr said that for many months after the shooting, he was “not even able to think straight”.

“I was struggling with a lot of things,” he said. Forgiveness was just one of them.

Now, he described Terri Roberts as “a friend”. The week of the anniversary had been stressful, but he wanted to make a point of thanking “the whole world” for its support, not just in 2006 but the decade since.

“Without that,” he said, “there is no way I would have made it through.”