Not sure if you have been reading this blog, or if you have been aware of what's going on in our world. But, if you have heard and read about the pain inflicted upon the Amish in Pennsylvania, pray for them.

And read this article, and be prepared to discuss it tonight. There are a lot, a lot, of things in here that you will benefit from if you understand it.

Gunman said he (did bad things to) girls long ago

Associated Press

QUARRYVILLE, Pa. - The gunman who killed five girls in an Amish schoolroom confided to his wife during the siege that he (did bad things to) two relatives 20 years ago when he was a boy and was tormented by dreams of doing it again, authorities said Tuesday.

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Holding up a copy of the gunman's suicide note at a packed news conference, Miller also suggested that Roberts was haunted by the death of his prematurely born daughter in 1997. The baby, Elise, died 20 minutes after being delivered, Miller said.

Elise's death "changed my life forever," the milk truck driver and father of three wrote to his wife. "I haven't been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself hate towards God and unimaginable emptyness it seems like everytime we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn't here to share it with us and I go right back to anger."

The state police commissioner identified the demons in Roberts' head a day after the shooting rampage shattered the sense of calm in Lancaster County's bucolic Pennsylvania Dutch Country, where the Amish live a peaceful, turn-the-other-cheek existence in an 18th-century world with no automobiles and no electrical appliances.

"He certainly was very troubled psychologically deep down and was dealing with things that nobody else knew he was dealing with," Miller said.

During the standoff, Roberts told his wife in a cell phone call from the one-room schoolhouse that he molested two female relatives when they were 3 to 5 years old, Miller said. Roberts would have been around 11 or 12 at the time. Also, in a suicide note left for his family, he said he "had dreams about doing what he did 20 years ago again," Miller said.

Police could not immediately confirm Roberts' claim (about the) two relatives. Family members knew nothing of (issues) in his past, Miller said. Police located the two relatives and were hoping to interview them.

If Roberts felt painfully conflicted about ... little girls, he might have blamed the children themselves and acted out his rage on them, one expert said. He might have considered them "responsible for his downfall," said criminal psychologist Eric Hickey at Alliant International University in Fresno, Calif.

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"We're quite certain, based on what we know, that he had no intention of coming out of there alive," Miller said.

At the time Roberts' wife received the phone call, she was attending a meeting of a prayer group she led that prayed for the community's schoolchildren.

Church members visited with the victims' families Tuesday, preparing meals and doing household chores, while Amish elders planned the funerals. An Amish woman who helped comfort family members said they were being sustained by prayer.

"It's a tragedy we've never seen before," said the woman, whose father was a church bishop. Like many Amish, she declined to give her name. "They said it was a happy school," she said. "The children were happy, the teachers were happy."

Roberts, from the nearby town of Bart, was not Amish and did not appear to have anything against the Amish, Miller said. He said Roberts was bent on killing girls and apparently figured he could succeed at the serene schoolhouse.

Dwight Lefever, a Roberts family spokesman, spoke at a community prayer service Tuesday evening and said he was at the home of Roberts' father when an Amish neighbor came to comfort the family.

"He stood there for an hour, and he held that man in his arms, and he said, 'We will forgive you,'" Lefever said. "He extended the hope of forgiveness that we all need these days."

Sam Stoltzfus, 63, an Amish woodworker who lives a few miles away from the shooting scene, said his grandchildren were full of questions when they came home from another Amish school.

"They were terrified," said Stoltzfus, whose son took the grandchildren to school Tuesday morning so they wouldn't have to walk by themselves. "They wanted to know: What was wrong with him? Why was he doing that?"

Stoltzfus said the victims' families will be sustained by their faith.

"We think it was God's plan and we're going to have to pick up the pieces and keep going," he said. "A funeral to us is a much more important thing than the day of birth because we believe in the hereafter. The children are better off than their survivors."

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Associated Press Writer Michael Rubinkam contributed to this report.