Murder Visits an Amish School House

A funeral procession of horse-drawn buggies makes their way down Georgetown Road in Georgetown, Pa. Friday, Oct. 6, 2006, to bury Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, one of five girls killed Monday, in a shooting at an Amish school. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) (Matt Rourke - AP)

Police traced the call. A hostage negotiator dialed Marie's cell phone. Again, Roberts didn't answer.

He started shooting.

He fired at least four rounds from the shotgun, and 13 rounds from the 9 mm. Some were delivered to the backs of the girls' heads.

With riot shields held in front of them, the troopers started running.

They never fired a shot. Some wrestled with the front door, unable to get in. Others went through the front windows. Roberts was reloading as they came over the sills. He held the 9 mm to the middle of his forehead, and pulled the trigger.

Inside the simple classroom, with its wooden desks and big chalkboard, was chaos and blood and broken glass. The troopers lost valuable time unlashing the girls' feet. Marian Fisher was already dead. An officer scooped up 7-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersol, who weighed about 50 pounds, and dashed out. By the time he reached the end of the lane, she was dead.

Helicopters descended to remove the wounded. Amish families walked from all directions, and stopped at yellow crime tape incongruously blowing in fields of green. They bowed their heads. Normally stoic, these plain people who shun electricity and automobiles and telephones, covered their faces and wept.

The tumult reached beyond the schoolroom.

Helicopters were offered to take the victims' families to hospitals. They refused to ride in the contraptions. The desperately wounded girls had already been loaded and taken away, but officers didn't know their names, or which hospitals they had been taken to. Some families went to the wrong hospitals. Another arrived at a hospital only to learn their daughter was really in the morgue.

"We had all these victims at the scene, that we're triaging and trying to get help," said State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller. "We didn't know who they were. We just knew we had a young, female victim that was taken to hospital X." In the end, hospital staff had to take digital photographs of the victims they had, send them to the state police, so officers could show them to teachers for identification.

"When I got to the scene, many of these troopers were covered in blood," said Miller.

Three girls would later die from their wounds: