Amish Woman Passes Away 18 Years Post Deadly Schoolhouse Shooting

A woman injured during the tragic shooting at a Pennsylvania Amish schoolhouse has passed away 18 years after the incident. Rosanna S. King, who was only six years old at the time of the attack, died on Tuesday at her home. A funeral service is scheduled for Friday at her residence in the farming community of Paradise.

On October 2, 2006, a gunman named Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year-old milk truck driver, entered the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Lancaster County. He held the building hostage, allowing several boys and adults to leave before he barricaded himself inside with ten girls. Roberts shot them and then took his own life as police arrived on the scene.

Rosanna King was one of the survivors but suffered devastating injuries. Shot in the head, she was left unable to speak and dependent on a feeding tube. Caring for her became a significant challenge for her family, as she required assistance for personal care and mobility.

In the aftermath of the shooting, her family provided updates on her condition, expressing that while she could recognize family members and managed to smile at times, her injuries left her in a constant state of suffering. In a statement from 2007, her family noted, “the hardest part has been to see her suffer.”

Rosanna was scheduled to be laid to rest in Bart Cemetery, a local burial ground significant to her community.

Following the shooting, Roberts’ mother, Terri Roberts, reached out to the victims’ families, including Rosanna’s, inspired by the Amish community’s response of forgiveness. The King’s family’s journey through forgiveness was complex, as expressed by Rosanna’s father, Christ King, in a 2013 interview. He acknowledged the intense weight of expectation surrounding the idea of forgiveness, stating, “We have a lot of work to do to live up to what we are bragged up to be.”

Roberts had left behind several notes indicating that he was haunted by memories of alleged abuse and the loss of his own daughter years prior, contributing to his mental anguish leading up to the tragic events.

The site of the shooting was demolished shortly after the incident, and a new school was built nearby to serve the community.

The Amish community, known for its strong Christian values and commitment to familial bonds, typically distances itself from many modern conveniences. Their traditional lifestyles include wearing plain clothing and using horse-drawn buggies for transportation, communicating in a dialect known as Pennsylvania Dutch.

Coincidentally, Rosanna’s passing occurred around the same time a 14-year-old student in Georgia was charged with a school shooting, which left four people dead. This stark comparison highlights an unsettling trend, as there have been over 600 mass killings reported in the United States since the incident at the Amish school.