Amish woman shot in 2006 West Nickel Mines schoolhouse attack dies at 23

Rosanna S. King, who was severely injured as a 6-year-old in the 2006 shooting at the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania, has died 18 years later, a funeral director said Thursday. King, now 23, died at her home on Tuesday. According to an obituary from Furman Home for Funerals in Leola, a funeral is planned at her home in the farming community of Paradise on Friday. Funeral director Philip Furman confirmed she was among those shot in October 2006.

In the attack, a gunman killed five girls and wounded five others in the one-room schoolhouse. Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year-old milk truck driver, barricaded himself inside, let boys and several adults go, and tied up 10 girls before shooting them. He took his own life as police closed in.

King belonged to an Old Order Amish church community and was considered the most severely injured survivor. She had been shot in the head, which left her unable to talk and dependent on a feeding tube. She needed others for personal care and mobility. A year after the shooting, her family said in a statement that she could recognize family members, smiled often and had limited physical movement. In 2007, they said, “the hardest part has been to see her suffer.”

Roberts’ mother, Terri Roberts, regularly visited King, which the source attributes to the forgiveness the Amish community expressed to her and her family after the attack. In a 2013 interview, King’s father, Christ King, said there were times he asked himself whether he had truly forgiven the shooter. “We have a lot of work to do to live up to what we are bragged up to be,” he said at the time. “Everyone was talking about this forgiveness thing, and I felt that was putting a lot of weight on our shoulders to live up to that.”

Roberts indicated in suicide notes and in a final call with his wife that he had been tormented by memories of having molested a couple of young relatives, which he described as unsubstantiated, and by the death of his newborn daughter in 1997. The schoolhouse was torn down 10 days after the killings, and a new one was built nearby.

The Amish emphasize their Christian faith and family life and avoid many modern conveniences. They wear traditional clothing, use horses and buggies for much of their transportation, and often speak a German dialect known as Pennsylvania Dutch.

King’s death came the same week that a 14-year-old Georgia student was charged with using an assault-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers at his high school about an hour outside Atlanta.

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