Since I don't think the Amish want any more attention brought to their community about this thing I am in a bit of awe about this. I also read that the wife of the killer was invited to one of the funerals and some of the elder Amish folks have asked that a fund be set up for the wife and kids.Amish sisters asked to die first, family friend says
By Keith Herbert
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
GEORGETOWN, Pa. - A 13-year-old Amish girl killed by the gunman in the Lancaster County schoolhouse asked to be shot first in an attempt to buy time for the younger students, according to a close family friend.
The girl's 11-year-old sister then said, "Shoot me next."
The account of what occurred inside the West Nickel Mines Amish School on Monday was related this morning by Rita Rhodes, a Mennonite nurse-midwife who had delivered 13-year-old Marian Fisher, who was buried yesterday. Rhodes, a lifelong resident of nearby Quarryville, also delivered Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, who was to be buried today.
The younger Fisher girl, Barbie, survived the assault and told her family what happened from her bed at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where she is being treated for wounds to her shoulder, hand and leg.
Marian had been bound with the other children by Charles Carl Roberts IV in the West Nickel Mines Amish School. "They were already tied up, they knew they were going to be shot," Rhodes said, and "Barbie says that Marian said she'd be first. And then Barbie said, 'Shoot me next.'
"The older girls were trying to save the younger girls, thinking that if they offered themselves, maybe the gunman would spare the younger girls.
"I think it was just an amazing display of courage. God really had to be present in that schoolhouse to give them that courage," said Rhodes, who heard about the incident from Ruben Fisher, the girls' grandfather and the father of Emma Zook, the teacher who escaped from the school before the five girls were killed and five others wounded. Roberts also killed himself.
"Barbie said somewhere during all the conversations" in the one-room schoolhouse, Roberts "asked the girls to pray for him," Rhodes said.
"He said he hated God, but yet he must have realized that God was going to decide his future, and that the girls had a link to God. So he asked them to pray for him."
While privately I am sure there is some form of hatred for Roberts, as a community I am amazed and how forgiving they have been over this.