Read Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy for Free Online

quarter of a mile across the fields for help. They arrived at a nearby Amish farm, where the distraught Emma begged for help. At 10:35 A.M., a 911 operator received a call from the farm’s phone shanty: “There’s a guy in the school with a gun.”
     
    Back in the schoolhouse, Roberts was agitated. He was surprised to find other adults in the schoolhouse and astonished that the teacher had run for help. He sent one of the boys to bring her back.
     
    Roberts tied the feet and legs of some of the girls with zip ties and also bound some of the girls to each other. Several times he promised not to hurt them if they obeyed. The children, raised to trust and obey adults, believed him—at least at first.
     
    To conceal his activities, Roberts pulled down the school’s blinds, but one of them snapped back to the top of the window and fell to the floor. In order to reattach it, he climbed atop a desk. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Emma, whose legs were free, heard a woman’s voice say, “Run,” and run she did. No one else heard the voice, and some Amish believe it was the voice of an angel. Next Roberts shoved a ten-year-old boy, who was lying on the floor, out the side door. The pregnant visitor was comforting Naomi Rose, a sobbing seven-year-old, but the gunman soon ordered the adult women to leave. Next he told the boys—eleven of whom had sisters in the schoolhouse—to get out. Stunned and terrified, the boys gathered near the boys’ outhouse to pray. Roberts quickly carried in the rest of his supplies from the truck.
     
    Now he was alone with his prey. As he nailed the doors shut to barricade the girls in the dark room, Roberts heard one of them praying. “Would you pray for me?” he asked. One of the girls responded, “Why don’t you pray for us?” He purportedly replied, “I don’t believe in praying.” He had come to molest them, not to pray for them. “If one of you will let me do what I want to, I won’t hurt the rest of you,” he said. One of the younger girls, not understanding his request but hoping to save the others from harm, offered to help. The older girls quickly said in Pennsylvania German, “Duh’s net! Duh’s net!” (Don’t do it! Don’t do it!)
     
    At one moment in the unfolding tragedy, Roberts mumbled something about giving up and even walked toward the door, according to one of the survivors. For some reason, however, he returned to his plan, telling the girls that he was sorry he had to “do this.” According to the survivors, he said, “I’m angry at God and I need to punish some Christian girls to get even with Him.”
     
    At 10:44 A.M., just nine minutes after the 911 call from the phone shanty, three state troopers arrived at the school. They found the doors locked and the blinds pulled. Seven more officers arrived shortly thereafter and quickly surrounded the schoolhouse. A police negotiator, using the bullhorn on his cruiser, tried to contact Roberts, asking him numerous times to put down his gun.
     
    During the standoff, Roberts called his wife on his cell phone to say he was not coming home and that he had left notes for everyone. He was angry at God, he said, for the death of their firstborn daughter, Elise, who had lived for only twenty minutes after her birth nine years earlier. In the note to his wife Roberts had written, “I’m not worthy of you, you are the perfect wife, you deserve so much better. . . . I’m filled with so much hate towards myself, hate towards God, and an unimaginable emptiness. It seems like every time we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn’t here to share it with us and I go right back to anger.”
     
    Roberts grew even more agitated when he realized that the police had arrived and his plan to molest the girls had failed. At 10:55 A.M. he called 911: “I just took ten girls hostage and I want everybody off the property or else. . . . Right now, or they’re dead in two seconds . . . two seconds, that’s it!”
     
    Roberts