For about 48 hours following Monday’s tragic shootings at West Nickel Mines School in Bart Township, Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Col. Jeffrey B. Miller shouldered the burden of describing to the world what happened inside the one-room Amish schoolhouse.

He discussed in great detail what transpired in the days, hours and minutes leading to Charles Carl Roberts IV’s violent rampage, which claimed the lives of five young girls, left five more wounded and also ended Roberts’ life.

And Miller did his best to answer the unanswerable question that people here and abroad have been asking since the shootings occurred.

Why did this happen?

“Because of the nature of this event and the community in which it occurred, we have a responsibility to answer, as best we can, ‘Why?’ ” Miller said in an emotional interview Thursday. “I truly believe that’s part of our job description in this case.”

And while Miller, 43, of Harrisburg, is the face of authority people will forever connect with this tragic story, he was quick to point out his job was made easy by the skill and professionalism of the troopers and commanders of Lancaster’s Troop J.

“When I first got to the scene and saw troopers going in and out of the school, covered with blood, doing what they had to do — I saw the looks on their faces, the resolve to do their job,” Miller said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I was so proud of them to do what they did.”

Community leaders in Lancaster County said they appreciated the job Miller did working with the private and peaceful Amish people and the world media.

“He had a sweet spirit about him,” said Wendy Nagle, president of Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau. “His demeanor, his caring, his kindness — his respect of everyone at all levels — was just an absolutely wonderful representation for our community.”

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Miller was nominated by Gov. Ed G. Rendell to serve as the 18th commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police on Jan. 9, 2003. The state Senate unanimously confirmed him on March 24, 2003.

As commissioner, Miller has administrative, command and fiscal authority of a department with a $670 million annual budget and a statewide work force of more than 6,000 civilian and enlisted employees, including 4,300 state troopers.

A native of Harrisburg, where he lives with his wife, Andrea, and their two daughters, Miller is a 1981 graduate of Central Dauphin High School.

He holds an associate’s degree from University of South Florida, a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Elizabethtown College and a master’s degree in public administration from Penn State.

After enlisting in the Pennsylvania State Police in 1984, Miller served as a trooper at the Bedford, York and Harrisburg stations. During his progression through the ranks, when he served for three years at the Avondale barracks, Miller worked in various assignments, including patrol, internal affairs, drug-law enforcement and criminal investigation.

He was the criminal investigation section commander at Troop K, Philadelphia, and station commander at Troop L, Schuylkill Haven, prior to being named commanding officer at Troop H, Harrisburg, in 1995.

Miller was named the department’s director of legislative affairs in 2000.

He is a graduate of the FBI’s National Academy and the FBI’s National Executive Institute, both in Quantico, Va., and is an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Elizabethtown College.

Miller credits his years of training and experience for helping him deal with this week’s tragic shootings.

“I felt that I was prepared to handle this,” he said.

Even so, Miller said, the brutal nature of the slayings of innocent Amish girls and the ensuing crush of worldwide media were like nothing he’d encountered before.

“I think we’d be hard-pressed to find anything in Pennsylvania history like this,” he said.

About 11 a.m. Monday, Miller was seated in an auditorium at University of Maryland in College Park, preparing to speak to a gathering of law-enforcement officials from Maryland, Delaware and Virginia.

Out of habit, Miller said he glanced at his BlackBerry wireless organizer and noticed he had received “10 to 12 e-mails.”

“I knew before I opened any of them that something was up,” he said.

Miller started reading the messages and quickly realized he had to get back to Pennsylvania.

“I knew that if what I was reading was even half right, we were dealing with a large-scale tragedy that would attract attention from all over the country,” he said.

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Worried about being a three-hour drive from the Nickel Mines area, Miller said Maryland State Police offered to fly him by helicopter to the scene of the tragedy. He arrived in 30 minutes.

“It was my responsibility as the head of this agency to be there and to handle the situation,” he said. “It would be unfair for me to burden the commanders and troopers at the scene with the unbelievable crush of media that we all knew was coming.

“The local staff had an investigation to conduct.”

Miller said he had no doubts the “investigation and the Amish community” would be taken care of by the local state police officers.

“When I looked around at the quality of the people we had out there, I knew we were going to do everything thoroughly, accurately and with complete respect for the community,” he said.

Miller immediately set about assembling information he could present to the media as quickly as possible. He admitted mistakes were made, such as his own claim that a teacher’s aide was one of the girls killed inside the schoolhouse. That turned out not to be true.

“The girl I thought was the aide turned out to be 12 or 13, and she was just bigger than the other students,” Miller said. “We corrected that as we went about our investigation.”

At noon Tuesday, Miller held a lengthy press conference, during which he presented in unprecedented detail the history of Roberts’ actions leading to the shooting.

He talked about the tools and weaponry Roberts took with him to the school and how Roberts possibly planned to use some of the equipment to sexually assault the girls before killing them.

He read from some of the suicide notes Roberts left for his family.

And he discussed Roberts’ claim to his wife shortly before he opened fire that he had molested two female relatives 20 years ago when Roberts was 12 and the girls were about 4 or 5.

“My intent was to present all the information we had that we could present without being disrespectful to the victims or their families so that people could begin to understand why this happened,” Miller said. “Investigating the shooting and taking care of the community was job one, but getting information to the media was certainly job 1-A.”

State police later spoke to the two female relatives Roberts said he molested, and both said they had no recollection of those events.

“That doesn’t mean nothing happened,” Miller said. “It might not have been to the extent (Roberts) described to his wife. But in his mind, something happened that stuck with him his whole life, and he obviously carried around this guilt with him.”

Dick Shellenberger, chairman of the Lancaster County commissioners, expressed gratitude for the way Miller “represented the state police, the Amish and our county.”

Shellenberger and both of his fellow commissioners participated in a conference call along with Miller and Gov. Rendell Monday afternoon during which they were briefed on the shootings.

“I thought he was very good,” Shellenberger said. “He told us what we needed to know as local officials.”

The emotion Miller displayed during the call when he described the horrible violence that occurred inside West Nickel Mines School struck a particular chord with Shellenberger.

“I appreciated that he was a man of emotion,” he said. “I think it’s OK to show emotion, especially in a situation like this, even though some people might say he shouldn’t because he’s a police officer.”

Miller also displayed some of that emotion when he spoke to the press at media conferences, making several references to his own children and the fact that his family doesn’t live far from Bart Township.

“He had a very genuine personality,” Nagle said. “I think he has some God-given gifts that were put to use this week.”

The best explanation Miller said he could come up with for why Roberts would shoot 10 innocent Amish schoolgirls is that Roberts “felt God exacted punishment” on him for the events that caused his guilt by taking the life of his daughter, Elise, 20 minutes after she was prematurely born in 1997.

“He was angry with God, and he wanted to take revenge against God,” Miller said.

Such public speculation on what a killer might have been thinking is rare from a law-enforcement officer, Miller admitted.

“When the suspect in a case like this is alive, you can’t present everything to the media, because you have to prepare for a trial,” he said. “In this case, the suspect was deceased, and with the huge amount of interest in this tragedy from all over the world, we felt we had to do our best to help everyone understand why this occurred.

“The truth is, because Mr. Roberts is deceased, we will never truly know why.” blog comments powered by Disqus