First Amish girl’s funeral begins two-day process of burying five schoolhouse murder victims in same cemetery. Naomi Ebersol is recalled as a shy child who didn’t want to go to school that day.
A man walking children to school this morning ignores the media waiting for the funeral procession.
The media was lined along Route 896 in Georgetown this morning, waiting for the funeral procession to pass.
By Jack Brubaker
Updated Feb 20, 2007 12:19
By horse-drawn carriage and on foot, somber men and women garbed in black traveled through protective police barriers on White Oak and Mine roads.
They headed for the home of Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7, the only daughter of Amos and Katie Ann Fisher Ebersol.
The two-story house with yellow siding, not visible from any road, stands amid mature oak trees at the end of a winding lane. It’s about a quarter of a mile from the one-room schoolhouse on White Oak where Naomi died.
Hundreds of Amish from Bart Township and far beyond streamed into the home all day Tuesday and long into the night Wednesday.
They paid their respects to the family, viewed Naomi’s body, prepared food and cleaned house.
Carpenters constructed a framework over the front porch and covered it with plastic in case of rain. Wagons conveyed sturdy mourners’ benches to the site.
Food processed by many hands filled the kitchen. The benches filled the porch and all the first-floor rooms but one. That room had been cleared of furniture except for one small bench.
On that bench in that bare room lay Naomi’s body in a plain pine coffin with its hinged lid open.
A pretty little girl in a white dress, with a white prayer cap covering her dark brown hair, Naomi showed no signs of her morning of suffering three days ago.
Naomi’s funeral followed ancient tradition. Several Old Order ministers delivered lengthy sermons in German, providing biblical instruction and admonition.
The mourners’ attention no doubt periodically strayed to the catastrophic events that had propelled them to this house today.
On Monday morning, Carl Roberts, a 32-year-old milk truck driver and father of three who lived a mile away, armed himself and entered the school. He ordered everyone but 10 girls to leave.
He barricaded the doors, shot the girls in the back of the head, then killed himself.
Five of the girls have died. The rest remain in critical or serious condition.
As ministers urged mourners to submit to the will of God and prepare for life after death, some congregants no doubt thought specifically of the girl in the coffin.
Naomi Ebersol was at times a nervous little girl. She was not always comfortable in the second grade at the West Nickel Mines school and sometimes grew anxious during her morning walk there,
At those times she would consider turning back through the woods to the safety of her home.
But the eldest of her five brothers, Marcus and Ervin, comforted her and encouraged her, and so she would continue, walking out of the woods and along a lane through a meadow to the school.
Early Monday morning, as the sister and brothers made their way through the meadow, Naomi began to cry. She said she wanted to go home.
But the moment of anxiety passed and the three went on.
Much later in the morning, when Roberts burst into the school, brandishing weapons and oozing anger, Naomi was severely frightened. She fell crying to the floor.
One of the older women lay down beside her to comfort her.
But then Roberts ordered all the older women, including the teacher and her aides, to leave the building. He told the boys to go as well, and so Marcus and Ervin had to abandon their little sister.
When state police troopers broke into the building, they discovered 13-year-old Marian Fisher and Roberts dead and the other nine girls lying in pools of blood on the floor.
A trooper picked up Naomi and carefully carried her out the door onto the front lawn.
There the little girl who didn’t want to go to school died in his arms.
Twelve-year-old Anna Mae Stoltzfus died on the way to the hospital.
Eight-year-old Mary Liz Miller and her 7-year-old sister, Lena, died in hospitals hours later.
Funerals for these girls were planned for this afternoon and Friday.
All these funerals, but not the sites, would be similar. The Ebersols’ house is unique.
Well over a century ago, this was the “mansion house” of Charles “Cappy’’ Doble, superintendent of the old Gap Nickel Mines, from which this area took its name.
A dozen years ago, the Ebersols went to housekeeping here. All their children were born in this house. Now Amos runs a woodshop in the barn and Katie cares for the home and Naomi’s five brothers.
At the end of this morning’s solemn funeral in the old mansion house, the congregation prayed and a minister pronounced a benediction.
Then the mourners abandoned the hard benches, returned to their dark carriages and fell in line behind a horse-drawn open wagon bearing Naomi’s coffin.
With horses reined to a plodding pace, the procession turned south on Mine Road and headed toward Georgetown. There the mourners filed past the Bart Township Fire Co., where many of the men serve as volunteers.
And then they turned down Quarry Road to Bart Amish Cemetery.
As they halted their buggies around the burial ground, many no doubt remembered another time of sadness, in mid-December three years ago, when they buried 20-year-old Henry Miller here.
Miller, also of Nickel Mines, was the eldest of five Amish friends killed when their Jeep collided with a snowplow. At the time, the Amish viewed the tragedy as one of the worst ever to befall their community.
Now they have another benchmark.
The mourners filed past scores of small, plain headstones reading Miller and Ebersol and Fisher and Stoltzfus and gathered around a freshly dug grave at the rear of the cemetery.
There, during a brief, simple ceremony, the extended Ebersol family and many friends lowered the coffin of little Naomi into the earth.
And there, as funerals continued, would the other families bury their daughters.
Autumn will pass and winter come, and in the spring the Amish farmers in adjacent fields will plow and plant again.
——— All of the children’s funerals are private and restricted from the public and press. This account was assembled from the writer’s earlier observations, with substantial aid from friends and neighbors of the Ebersols.
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