“We are slowly getting back to our feet,” Amos K. Ebersol, Naomi’s father, said during a telephone interview Tuesday. “We are getting by.”

Amos, his wife, Katie, and the couple’s five sons are now able to reminisce about their daughter and sister, who was a second-grader at the Amish school.

“We can sit down and talk about (her) and the memories,” Mr. Ebersol said. “We are trying to keep that communication open.”

Naomi was among the 10 young girls who were bound and then shot by Charles Carl Roberts IV on the morning of Oct. 2.

Five of the girls, including Naomi, died, and the five others were wounded. Four remain hospitalized, and one has returned home.

Mr. Ebersol said going back to work last week at his family’s woodworking business has helped him with the grieving process, as has the razing of the schoolhouse in Bart Township.

“There was really no question as to (razing the school) or not,” said Mr. Ebersol, a board member of the school. “It was just a matter of when.”

Because the Ebersols live a stone’s throw from the site of the former school, he watched as heavy machinery erased the building from the earth Thursday.

Mr. Ebersol said he is not yet used to the sight of the barren field where the schoolhouse once stood.

“It makes it all seem so much more unreal,” he said. “Why don’t we wake up one of these days?”

Mr. Ebersol was in the schoolyard shortly after Roberts shot the girls and then killed himself. Police officers were there, too, but medical personnel had yet to arrive.

Ebersol said he walked from his home to the school when he heard the sound of breaking glass. What he heard were the police officers breaking through the windows after they heard gunshots from inside the school.

By the time police got inside, the girls, who were found near a chalkboard, had already been shot and Roberts was dead from a gunshot wound to the forehead.

A police officer told Mr. Ebersol to leave.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I wanted to help.”

Mr. Ebersol did remove a horse and buggy that had brought visitors to the school earlier that morning.

Those visitors and 15 male students were released by the gunman before the girls were shot.

A teacher, Emma Mae Zook, Zook’s mother and a female student, Emma Fisher, escaped to the home of a neighbor, who called 911.

The school shootings attracted a swarm of media to Nickel Mines. Despite their sometimes intrusive presence, Mr. Ebersol said he was not angry with the outsiders.

“I didn’t have a problem with it, if this can help somebody,” he said.

He said the events of Oct. 2 were God’s way of “putting His word into the world,” and he hopes they will strengthen the public’s faith.

After hearing the news that his daughter had died, Amos said his feelings were indescribable.

He did not know the man who shot and killed his daughter, he said, and he was not angry with him.

“As a parent of one of the girls, I never had a second thought of not forgiving,” he said. “I never had a thought of hate in my mind.”

Mr. Ebersol said his family has since built a relationship with the state police trooper who tried to revive Naomi before she died at the school that morning.

The trooper and his family visited the Ebersol home this week.

“We have made new friends,” Mr. Ebersol said.


Letter from the Ebersols

Forgiveness is a matter of faith