20 Years After The Nickel Mines Amish School Shooting, the Shooter’s Wife Reflects on The Forgiveness That Changed Her Life

West Nickel Mines school, circa 1990. Photo by Don Shenk

This year will mark the 20th anniversary of the Nickel Mines school shootings, in which five Amish girls were killed, and another five wounded (with a sixth girl passing away years later due to long-term effects of her injuries).

BBC Radio 4 has done a program looking back at the incident, and including comments from the shooter Charlie Roberts’ wife, and how she endured the experience.

It also includes commentary on the part of the story – which, as the book Amish Grace put well in its subheading – transcended the tragedy of that day – namely, the forgiveness offered by the Amish people involved.

You can listen to the nearly 30-minute program here. I thought I’d share a few excerpts that stood out. First, from the shooter’s wife, Marie Monville.

A Contrast In Expectations

First, in terms of how she had to respond in the immediate aftermath. Her husband’s actions had left behind not just a wife but small children among other relatives.

Marie found herself in the position of both having to break the news to her children – and to somehow explain what her husband did:

“Police were saying to me, you should prepare to leave your home for about a week. The media is coming and you need to get out of here.” With help from her parents, Marie quickly gathers her things and takes her three young children to their home around the corner. She knows that she has to explain what’s happened to her children.

“My parents were in the backyard with the kids and I was taking a few minutes to listen to the sound of their laughter coming in through the window and thinking, ‘When am I ever going to hear this sound again?’ I called them in and I said, ‘Today your dad made some very bad choices and some people got hurt and some people died and he died too.’ As a mom, that felt like a lot of weight.”

“There were so many things about that day that were weighty for me. Just so many hard questions that I was trying to deal with. Everybody was asking me to give an answer for Charlie’s choices, you know, to explain why he chose to do what he did.”

She also describes the moment when two Amish men are seen approaching her house – and what they did in the powerful moments that followed:

“And so I went to my mom and dad and said, I know they’re coming here and I don’t know what to say. And my dad said, it’s okay, Marie, you can stay inside and I’ll go out and talk with them.”

Marie holds her breath, and watches their conversation from the window. “I couldn’t hear what they said, but I could see everything. I saw the way they put their hands on my dad’s shoulder. I saw the tears that flowed down everyone’s faces, and I saw the way that they embraced him before they walked away. And I was shocked in that moment, you know, just by the visible acts of compassion that transpired in that driveway.

“And so when my dad came back inside, he…he was so overcome by emotion. And he said, Marie, they came because they were concerned about you. They were concerned about your kids. They wanted you to know that they had forgiven Charlie and they were extending grace and compassion over your family.”

This act contrasted greatly with the expectations of outsiders Marie had experienced up til then:

“Up until that moment, everybody had been asking me to give an account for Charlie’s choices. And here they were, the ones who had the greatest right to demand something. And they didn’t come to get something from me at all. But instead, they came to give this incredible gift to tell about the forgiveness that they had already extended over Charlie and the way that that had moved them to compassion for our family.”

That question of “how were the Amish able to forgive?” came to dominate discussion in the aftermath. Steven Nolt offers some perspective on that.

How The Amish Forgave

Nolt shares how the way that the Amish approach forgiveness from a somewhat different perspective than many of us:

“From an Amish perspective, I think it wasn’t surprising. In fact, some of the Amish folks that we talked to in the days and weeks after the shooting were actually somewhat surprised at the public response to their actions.”

Stephen Nolt is professor of history and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and co-author of the book Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy, and it explores the remarkable response of the Amish community in nickel mines to this shooting.

“One of the markers of Amish life as a collectivist society and as a church that values community is a value for which there’s a German word, Gelassenheit, and it means yielding, putting one’s own desires second. And so that supports their ethic of non-resistance, of non-retaliation and non-revenge. And forgiveness is taught.”

“They see their relationship with God and their relationship with other people as so intertwined that to think about God’s acts of forgiveness towards them as humans necessarily implies their need to forgive others.”

Forgiveness is not just an emotion or act, but an extension of Amish identity, developed over generations.

“…it doesn’t strike them as something that is unnatural because it is of a piece with so many other aspects of their life. For Amish people, forgiveness was hard, but not something that they saw as unnatural.”

…

“Everyone has the ability and the necessity, Amish people would say, to respond and forgive for the part of the wrong that they have experienced.”

“In a more individualistic culture or society, everything would be placed on the immediate victim or the victim’s immediate family, which doesn’t realistically offer the same kind of dynamic response.”

The media struggled to understand this concept. The forgiveness was framed as either heroic or emotionally unhealthy, and I felt a similar response. Professor Nolt says that neither get to the heart of what’s really going on.

“Some psychologists use the language of decisional forgiveness versus emotional forgiveness. Emotional forgiveness is understood to be usually a lengthy process, something that is often private, involves often interior work, whereas decisional forgiveness is something that is public, often verbal, that involves concrete actions or statements that say, ‘I forgive’.”

Last year, Nolt elaborated on these “two types” of forgiveness in another interview (more on that here).

Another expert contributes to the discussion. Everett Worthington is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and described as “one of the foundational figures in forgiveness science.” He offers further insights on the two variants of types of forgiveness:

After years working as a therapist, Professor Worthington realized that people would really struggle with emotional forgiveness.

“They’d commit to decisional forgiveness. Remember, that’s the act of declaring publicly, I forgive. But they’d also commit to decisional forgiveness, but still carry and feel a lot of negative emotion. And so the REACH model was devised to help people tackle that. Those two types of forgiveness are relatively independent of each other. They’re not two halves, right, of forgiveness. They’re actually two different experiences of forgiveness.”

“And it doesn’t matter what order you do them in, because people seem to struggle with emotional forgiveness more than decisional forgiveness. We take them through emotional forgiveness to kind of lower the emotions before they make a decision to forgive.”

Forgiveness Began That Day

Towards the end of the program, Marie goes on to describe how she remarried, and was able to move on after the tragedy.

“If there was one thing that I wanted, it was to live a life that was not defined by Charlie’s choices. And here was this very community that saw me that way.”

“It started this chain of events for me that has very much continued for these 20 years. I’ve had to forgive Charlie again and again and again for the pain or the suffering or the things that are said to my kids. It’s this continual process. And so I’m grateful that for me, that process started that very day by the impact of the Amish community.”

There’s a good bit to this program so if you’re interested in the topic I recommend listening to it in its entirety at the link at top.

This program is timed a bit early in terms of the actual 20th anniversary of the shootings, which happened October 2nd, 2006. I did the video below recapping the story on the 15th anniversary.