Then came Oct. 2, and all the other stories of 2006 faded into insignificance.


What happened in that one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines on that lovely Monday defined 2006 in Lancaster County. We’ll remember this year as the year Charlie Roberts shot those 10 schoolgirls, as we remember 2001 for Sept. 11 and 1963 for John F. Kennedy.


But the killing of five girls, and the critical wounding of five others, in Bart Township wasn’t the only awful thing to happen in rural and suburban Lancaster County last year, just the worst.


It was the year when violence, the kind we usually associate with cities, invaded the county.


Six months before Nickel Mines, six members of the Wise family were found bludgeoned and strangled in their Leola home. Jesse Dee Wise Jr. is charged with the killings.
Not long after that, David Ludwig pleaded guilty to shooting his girlfriend’s parents, Mike and Cathy Borden, in their Warwick Township home, a crime that shocked the county in November 2005.


What’s happening here?


Hard to say, thinks Dr. Joel Eigen, a professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College.


“You can really only grasp trends in retrospect,” he says. “Three horrible incidents do not a trend make. ...
“You just scratch your head and wonder what's going on here.”


“What may be disturbing about these three events is they were seemingly out of your control, my control,” notes F&M sociology professor Dr. Carol Auster, and so they make us feel more at risk of being victimized, too.


“I would argue in terms of actual risk, our risk is not increased. ...


“Something can go wrong such that there could be some emotional breakdown that could lead to family violence anywhere: urban, rural or suburban.”


No debate on No. 1


In the annual vote of the Sunday News staff on the Top 10 stories of the year, the Nickel Mines massacre was a unanimous choice for the most important event of 2006.
Roberts, a milk truck driver who served some of the West Nickel Mines Parochial School families on his route, walked into the school that day with an arsenal. He separated girls from boys, allowing the boys and adults to leave. He bound the girls and might have been planning to molest them.
When state police moved in, Roberts shot all 10, killing five before ending his own life. The other five girls suffered critical injuries.


National media, which had descended on the county for the Borden and Wise killings, poured into Bart Township to report on the anomaly of mass murder among the gentle Amish.


In Lancaster County, people think of Lancaster city as the dangerous place. They move to the suburbs or to the country to get away from violence.


But Auster says none of the three cases in the news in 2006 necessarily indicates a pattern.


“Although these three cases seem random in the sense that they came out of nowhere,” she notes, “they weren't acts toward random people. Even in the case of Nickel Mines, something, it seems, made sense to him [Roberts] about why those girls. It seems random, but I don't think it is.


“Families or family-like relationships are those that can provide some of the most rewarding relationships in life. But families are also where there are the most intense feelings, both positive and potentially negative. I don't even think the next-door neighbors were in danger unless they had interrupted the murders.”


Eigen, the criminologist, says it’s not possible to delve deeply enough into the pathologies of killers to prevent violence from happening. The key instead is to prevent them from inflicting mass destruction.


“When you add in a gun or a rifle, you so qualitatively change the dynamics of death that it's just unmistakable,” he says.


“When I was a juvenile, it was fists or a knife.” Now it’s guns.


“A very disturbed person with a 2-by-4 is one thing; a disturbed person with guns is another. ...
“We can lament and regret horribly the innocent loss of life, but this will continue until we take a very sober look at what we mean by gun control in the country.”


Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray takes no satisfaction in the reversal of fortune in 2006 that made the county statistically more lethal than the city.


“It affects us all,” he says. “We're all one community.”


Bowling alone?


If there is a concern, it might be that people are more isolated than they used to be, a phenomenon noted by Robert Putnam in his study “Bowling Alone.”


“People don't know one another as well as perhaps they once did,” Auster points out. They may be “less connected in rural and suburban areas than they once were, and that made it possible for them to spin out of control.”


Nothing probably could have prevented Nickel Mines or Warwick Township or Leola. Yet the move toward creating “neighborhood”-style communities here might be helpful, Auster says.


“At the very least, if they were successful at what they were doing, it would mean that people have daily contact with people in their neighborhoods, which perhaps could have served to help in some of these situations.”
She suggests the best response to the tragedies of 2006 is awareness.


“We need to watch the people around us for signs of emotional distress. We need to watch them for signs of detachment from either families or communities.


“It's not that we need to carry a gun. In some senses the best way to protect yourself is to know well the people around you and keep them connected and really know what's going on with them.”


Lancaster County may feel less safe after the horrors of 2006. That’s probably not a realistic perception, Auster says.


“The most dangerous thing we all do is get in our cars,” she says. “And yet we don't wake up every morning and say, ‘Gosh, that's risky; I'm not going to do it.’ ”


It might be more realistic for the Amish to feel less safe.


Yet Dr. Donald Kraybill, senior fellow of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, says the Amish community mostly has resisted that impulse.


“I think the Nickel Mines school situation has certainly made them more safety- and security-conscious,” says Kraybill, an authority on Anabaptist culture. Teachers are more cautious about strangers, for instance.


But Amish people aren’t isolated from the county around them, he says.


“Living in the Lancaster area, they read about other acts of violence. It simply heightens their awareness to the fact that these things happen.


“They really are able to put the Nickel Mines tragedy in the proper perspective, in they don't see this as a campaign against the Amish people. ...
“This was one deeply disturbed individual. In that sense it was really an anomaly or aberration.”


The worldwide response to the shootings, though, with millions donated for the medical care of the victims, did change some Amish perceptions.


“I think that created a new awareness of how people far away from Lancaster County cared about this and genuinely wanted to extend their condolences and extend their compassion,” Kraybill says.


The year that was


In any other year, the rest of the events on the Top 10 list would have been the focus of this story.


This year was, after all, when all three county commissioners pleaded guilty to violating the Sunshine Act for acting in secret to sell Conestoga View.


It was when Landis, the Mennonite boy from Farmersville, came from behind to win the Tour de France in a thrilling race, only to find himself effectively stripped of the title days later over test results indicating something was odd with his testosterone level.


It was when the Lancaster Barnstormers won the Atlantic League championship, and when Bruce Sutter, the relief pitcher from Mount Joy, made the major-league Hall of Fame.
It was when voter outrage over the 2005 pay raise resulted in the ouster of state Senate Majority Leader Chip Brightbill, who represented parts of the county, and Rep. Roy Baldwin, R-97th District.


“I guess I would hope for the future that this is a huge wakeup call, that the voters are paying attention and those of us who are elected certainly need to take that into consideration,” said Rep. Katie True, R-41st District, an opponent of the pay raise. ...
“I don't think they're going to settle for us to go back to the way things always have been done, and that's the way it should be.”


It was a year when three small children died in farm accidents, re-igniting the debate over safety and whether Amish farmers need to take more steps to keep their children away from hazardous equipment.


As it turned out, they needed to keep their children away from a milk truck driver named Charlie Roberts.


“Evil knows no boundaries, really,” Mayor Gray says.




E-mail Helen Colwell Adams at hcolwell@lnpnews.com.

Talkback on LancasterOnline

Welcome to the new TalkBack on LancasterOnline. Please use the comment box below to share your opinion on this article. If you would prefer to use the previous TalkBack forums instead, please use this link.

blog comments powered by Disqus