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Tuesday, October 3, 2006
'ANGRY AT GOD'
Vengeful gunman targets girls, killing at least 3 and
self
Lancaster-area man was armed for long siege
By CHRIS A. COUROGEN
Charles Carl Roberts IV was
angry and armed to the teeth when he arrived at the West Nickel
Mines Amish School yesterday morning, intent on avenging a
wrong that state police said dated back 20 years.
He took out that anger by
shooting girls execution-style after binding their legs and
lining them up in front of a chalkboard in the front of the
one-room school in rural Lancaster County.
Two girls died at the scene,
one in the arms of a state trooper. A third was dead on arrival
at Lancaster General Hospital.
Three girls were admitted to
Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, four to Children's
Hospital in Philadelphia and one to Christiana Hospital in
Delaware, state police said.
At press time for this
edition of The Patriot-News, some news organizations were
reporting that one of the hospitalized victims had died, but
the Hershey and Philadelphia hospitals reported no deaths. They
listed all but one of the wounded girls in critical condition.
A 13-year-old girl at Hershey was upgraded to serious
condition. The Delaware hospital did not release information
about its patient.
Most of the victims suffered
gunshot wounds to the back of the head.
"They were shot
execution-style," state police Commissioner Col. Jeffrey
B. Miller said. "It was a horrendous crime scene."
What ignited Roberts, 32, of
Bart, is unknown. Police speculated that the shooting was
intended to avenge something that happened to Roberts when he
was 12 years old.
Miller refused to elaborate
other than to say Roberts discussed the matter in a phone call
to his wife minutes before the shootings and mentioned it in
suicide notes he left for her and their three children.
"We are still
investigating the basis behind his potential motive,"
Miller said at a news conference. "You have to trust me
that I can't speak to the basis directly. There are other
people that could be affected by this, and I want to make sure
we do everything right with regard to that and with respect to
them before we make a determination as to what we say about
this other incident, if, in fact, it occurred.
"He was an angry man --
angry with life, angry at God," Miller said.
Investigators also said they
were looking into the possibility that the attack was related
to the death of one of Roberts' children. According to an
obituary, Roberts and his wife, Marie, lost a daughter shortly
after she was born in 1997.
Yesterday's siege appeared to
have been planned in meticulous detail.
Roberts, a milk-tanker truck
driver who lived near the school, dropped his three school-age
children off at a bus stop, then drove a borrowed pickup truck
to the school, arriving shortly before 10 a.m.
In the back of the truck was
lumber, hardware and tools to barricade the doors and weapons
and supplies he had assembled for what police said was planned
to be a last stand.
"He was going in there,
and he was never coming out," Miller said. "He had no
intention of coming out alive."
Roberts was armed with a 9 mm
semiautomatic pistol, a 12-gauge shotgun and a 30.06 rifle. A
stun gun and two knives were strapped to his belt.
A black range bag he carried
was filled with 600 rounds of ammunition. Roberts also had
synthetic black powder, which is used for reloading bullets,
and two cans of smokeless powder.
He carried a change of
clothes, toilet paper and earplugs in a five-gallon bucket.
One box contained tools
including a hammer, a hacksaw, pliers and wire. Wire ties, eye
bolts, rolls of clear tape and other hardware were in another
box.
Eye bolts were screwed into
some of the lumber recovered at the scene. Most of the supplies
had been purchased from a store nearby.
"It appears he was
prepared for a lengthy siege," Miller said.
Instead, it was over within
minutes after police arrived.
Police were alerted to the
hostage situation shortly after 10:30 a.m. by a 911 call from
the one-room school's teacher. She had escaped when Roberts
allowed the school's 15 male students and four other women to
leave. State police were there within nine minutes, Miller
said.
They set up a perimeter and a
hostage negotiator began trying to make contact when Roberts
called the Lancaster County 911 center from a cell phone.
Roberts told the emergency
dispatcher he would begin shooting if police did not withdraw
from the property in 10 seconds.
As word of Roberts' demand
reached the troopers, the negotiator tried calling him on the
cell phone number tracked from the 911 call. Within a few
seconds, shots rang out in rapid succession, police said.
Miller said Roberts fired at
least 13 shots from the handgun and three rounds from the
shotgun. At least one of the shotgun rounds was directed at
police as they stormed the building when the shooting started,
Miller said.
Unable to get through the
barricaded doors, police broke a window and crawled through. By
the time they got in, all the girls in the building had been
shot and Roberts was dead on the floor of a self-inflicted gun
wound, Miller said.
"It was over within a
matter of seconds," he said.
Miller said police fired no
shots during the siege.
The incident was the nation's
third school shooting in less than a week and was eerily
similar to a Colorado attack in which the shooter also targeted
girls. But Miller said he did not think this was a copycat
shooting.
Police said they believe
Roberts' revenge motive focused on young girls in the age range
-- 6 to 13 -- that attended the school. The school was a
"target of opportunity," Miller said. Police do not
believe the attack was aimed at the Amish for religious
reasons. Roberts was not Amish.
"The location was
probably chosen where he had a close opportunity to attack
where he knew he had young kids," Miller said. "It
seems as though he wanted to attack young female victims. This
is close to his residence. That is the only reason we can
figure that he chose this school. Plus the school is a one-room
schoolhouse which you can get to easily. It is not really
secured like another school district might be."
Jake King, an Amishman who
runs a lantern shop in Bart Twp., and is a neighbor of one of
the victims, said, "Maybe we have to have more concern
about security. The Amish have it in their mind God protects
us. God is in control."
After the shootings, members
of the students' families gathered at an Amish farm near the
school to await word on their daughters.
Miller said identifying the
victims was difficult because they had been sent to distant
hospitals. Police used photographs taken at the hospitals to
identify the girls and worked to make arrangements to get their
parents to their bedsides.
Police offered to fly the
parents to the hospitals, but their offers were turned down for
religious reasons.
"They won't do that, so
we tried to put together vans to ferry them to the hospital,"
Miller said. "We are trying to be respectful of Amish
custom and tradition."
CHRIS A. COUROGEN: 255-8112
or ccourogen@patriot-news.com
INFOBOX:
ROBERTS' ARSENAL:
Police
say Charles Carl Roberts IV was prepared for a long siege
yesterday. He brought the following to the school:
INFOBOX:
THE WOUNDED:
- Three
girls - 13, 8 and 6 - were taken to Penn State Milton S.
Hershey Medical Center, where they underwent surgery. The
eldest had been upgraded from critical to serious condition at
press time. She was in the intermediate care unit and was
capable of nonverbal communication with family, hospital
spokesman Sean Young said. The younger girls were listed in
critical condition in pediatric intensive care, spokeswoman
Amy Buehler Stranges said.
- Three
girls - 8, 10 and 12 - who were flown to Children's Hospital
of Philadelphia, were in surgery last night, spokeswoman Peggy
Flynn said. The youngest girl had wounds to her neck and arm.
The 10-year-old suffered head injuries. The oldest girl was
being treated for arm and leg injuries.
- A victim was taken by
helicopter to Christiana Hospital in Delaware, spokesman
Spiros Mantzavinos said. He would not give the person's age or
gender or release information about the condition or injuries,
citing confidentiality laws.
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