"It was a horrific crime scene," says Lancaster District Attorney Donald Totaro of the carnage. Photo by: Bradley C Bower / REUTERS |
Still, the cold brutality in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, in a community dedicated to simplicity and peace, seemed to take shock to a new, numbing level. "In my career I've never seen anything like this," Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller said in an emotional news conference. "We all look at this and see innocent victims and it could easily be our children." As one Amish shopkeeper in the community put it the day of the tragedy, "Everybody's over at the firehouse, and they don't even realize they're in shock, but they are in shock."
"I never saw him angry," says a neighbor of gunman Roberts. Photo by: Pennsylvania State Police / AP |
There could be, of course, no rational explanation for the horror. But in the day after the massacre authorities began to get a clearer idea of what might have triggered Roberts's rampage. In a suicide note to his wife, Marie, 28, Roberts described his anguish over the death of their daughter Elise, minutes after her premature birthin 1997. (The couple had three other children, ages 7, 5 and 2.) He said he was angry at God and wrote mysteriously of repeating something he had done 20 years ago. "I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself, hate towards God," he wrote. He went on to say that in recent years he had been tormented because his dreams had led him to believe he wanted "to do those things again," according to commissioner Miller of the state police. Later, in a phone call to his wife shortly before he began shooting, he was more explicit, claiming that he had molested two young relatives in his family.
If true, the incident would have occurred when Roberts was roughly 12 years old. But state police commissioner Miller said that investigators had so far turned up no evidence that any such molestation had ever taken place. Whatever the truth, neighbors and acquaintances describe Roberts, who lived with his family in a modest one-story home about five minutes from the Amish schoolhouse, as slightly aloof but not unfriendly.
