By Seamus McGraw
October 3, 2006
(Continued)
NICKEL MINES, Pa. (Crime Library) — On the surface, Charles Carl Roberts was a mild mannered man, his neighbors said, a milquetoast milk truck driver who shuttled from farm to farm in the hours before dawn, drove his three children to the school bus stop each morning, and never caused any trouble in his rural Pennsylvania community.
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| Police car near the school |
And yet, it seems, there was some deep and desperate monster lurking inside the 32-year-old Roberts, a darkness that led him on Monday morning to target the most vulnerable members of a peaceful and deeply religious community when he burst into a one room Amish school house. He barricaded the doors, using lumber he had carried inside with him, bound the feet of about a dozen girls ranging in age from six to 13, and gunned them down before taking his own life.
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| Inspectors at the Amish schoolhouse |
The shooting, the third school shooting in the United States in a week, and one of the most deadly in US history, seemed a chilling echo of an attack last week in Bailey, Colorado in which a 52-year-old man took several girls hostage, sexually assaulted several of them, and then killed one 16-year-old girl before taking his own life.
But in some respects, the attack on the Amish schoolhouse was even more brutal. According to the Pennsylvania State Police, Roberts stormed into the school sometime before 10:30 a.m., armed with an automatic pistol and a shotgun.
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See Crime Library Coverage of Kimveer Gill, Montreal School Shooter
See Coverage of Killer David Ludwig
Colorado Shooting
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