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then turned to the girls: “I’m going to make you pay for my daughter.” Marian, one of two thirteen-year-olds in the room, quickly assumed leadership of the younger girls, doing everything she could to help protect them. Realizing he planned to kill them, she said, “Shoot me first,” hoping to save the others and fulfilling her duty to watch over the little ones in her care.
     
    At about 11:05 A.M. the police heard three shotgun blasts followed by rapid-fire pistol shots. A shotgun blast, fired through the window by the main door, narrowly missed several officers. Troopers rushed the building, smashing windows with batons and shields. The killer turned the pistol on himself and fell to the floor as troopers broke through the windows. In execution style, he had gunned down the lineup of girls on the floor. Five would die. The other five, critically injured, had survived by rolling around and burying their heads in their arms.
     
    Police dispatchers radioed a “mass casualty,” and before long the site was flooded with a hundred state and local police, twenty ambulance crews, and trucks from five fire companies. The Lancaster County coroner who arrived on the scene called it “blood, glass, trash, chaos.” It was impossible to fit ten stretchers inside the schoolhouse, so troopers covered the children and carried them outside, where they tried to control the bleeding until ambulance crews could transport them away. Naomi Rose died in a trooper’s arms outside the school.
     
    The view could hardly have been more surreal: the serene pasture surrounding the schoolhouse looked like a combat zone. Five medevac helicopters arrived as four police helicopters and an airplane patrolled the skies. At one point, as the media converged on the site, eleven helicopters and several airplanes flew overhead until the police declared a no-fly zone above the school.
     
    A medevac helicopter lifted the first child skyward at 11:21 A.M., just eleven minutes after troopers reported the mass casualty alert. It headed northwest toward Penn State Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Amish farmers in northern Lancaster County, who had already heard of the shooting, saw the helicopter carrying one of their own as it flew over their farms. Other helicopters flew to hospitals in Lancaster, Philadelphia, and Reading. One child was flown to Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware.
     
    Parents, surrounded by family and neighbors, stood at a distance, watching the horrific scene without knowing the conditions of their daughters. Eventually about one hundred family members and friends gathered at a nearby Amish farm—the same one the teacher and her mother had run to for help—to console one another and wait for news. For several hours it remained unclear who was dead and who was alive. The children carried no identification, and with similar dress and many head injuries it wasn’t clear who had gone to which hospital. Photos taken at the hospitals were e-mailed back to a mobile command center so the parents could learn about the status and location of their children.
     
    Later in the day, word of the deadly toll began to spread. In addition to Naomi Rose, two others had died at the schoolhouse: thirteen-year-old Marian, who had offered to be shot first, and twelve-year-old Anna Mae. Indicative of the confusion that reigned that day, Anna Mae’s father had been driven to Christiana Hospital in Delaware expecting to see her, only to find a child from another Amish family. It wasn’t until 8:30 that evening that Anna Mae’s mother learned that she had died in the schoolhouse and concluded, “Now we know where she is [in heaven].”
     
    One family lost two daughters. Eight-year-old Mary Liz, who had been taken to Christiana Hospital, died in her mother’s arms shortly after midnight. Her parents were then driven seventy miles northwest to Hershey Medical Center. There, at 4:30 A.M., Lena, Mary Liz’s seven-year-old sister,