Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (13 page)
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Authors: Donald B. Kraybill,Steven M. Nolt,David L. Weaver-Zercher
BOOK: Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy
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The state was less generous, and the killer’s speedy trial ended with a death sentence. At that point, Amish people from Ohio and elsewhere began to write letters to Ohio’s governor asking for clemency for Peters. An Ontario Amish man admonished readers of the Amish correspondence newspaper
The Budget,
“Will we as Amish be blameless in the matter if we do not present a written request to the authorities, asking that his life be spared?” As letters piled up on the governor’s desk, he commuted Peters’s sentence seven hours before the scheduled electrocution.
The Budget,
“Will we as Amish be blameless in the matter if we do not present a written request to the authorities, asking that his life be spared?” As letters piled up on the governor’s desk, he commuted Peters’s sentence seven hours before the scheduled electrocution.
The Amish did believe that the crime should carry consequences. They had not interfered with the state’s rendering of justice—the widow, Dora Coblentz, had even testified at the trial—but they were reluctant to have an execution carried out in their name. Mose Coblentz and other Amish close to the family reported that they pitied Peters, whose time in the Air Force, it was said, had led him to drinking and delinquency. When Peters’s parents came to Ohio for the trial, several Amish families invited the couple for dinner, approaching them as fellow victims of their son’s actions.
In another case, two decades later, that garnered heavy media attention, including a feature article in
Rolling Stone,
the assailants were well-known to their Amish victims. Four non-Amish teenagers from Berne, Indiana, spent a warm, late summer night in 1979 harassing area Amish—a frequent activity for them. Riding in the back of a pickup truck, they threw stones and pieces of tile at the windows of Amish homes and into passing buggies. This night their projectiles hit a buggy occupied by Levi and Rebecca Schwartz and their seven children. One chunk of tile bounced off Rebecca’s arm, causing her to hold seven-month-old Adeline, who was wrapped in her lap, closer.
Rolling Stone,
the assailants were well-known to their Amish victims. Four non-Amish teenagers from Berne, Indiana, spent a warm, late summer night in 1979 harassing area Amish—a frequent activity for them. Riding in the back of a pickup truck, they threw stones and pieces of tile at the windows of Amish homes and into passing buggies. This night their projectiles hit a buggy occupied by Levi and Rebecca Schwartz and their seven children. One chunk of tile bounced off Rebecca’s arm, causing her to hold seven-month-old Adeline, who was wrapped in her lap, closer.
The attack was particularly unnerving because it happened after dark, so the Schwartzes hurried home. Arriving at their modest farm without further incident, Rebecca gave baby Adeline to an older daughter while she helped the younger children out of the buggy and into the house. Taking off their coats by lamplight, the family discovered that Adeline was dead. The piece of tile thrown into the buggy had struck the infant in the back of the head and, as examiners later concluded, killed her instantly and silently.
Within an hour, police had arrested the four assailants, aged eighteen and nineteen. “The boys were caught soon after,” wrote Adeline’s maternal grandmother in the next week’s issue of
The Budget
. “Some were our neighbors.” None of the teens had been in trouble with the law before, and it was hard to know how to make sense of their actions on that night. The grandmother, in an account filled with emotion over the death of Adeline, could only call the young men’s actions “foolish.”
The Budget
. “Some were our neighbors.” None of the teens had been in trouble with the law before, and it was hard to know how to make sense of their actions on that night. The grandmother, in an account filled with emotion over the death of Adeline, could only call the young men’s actions “foolish.”
Reported across the nation, the incident generated hundreds of letters expressing sympathy for the Schwartzes and calling for harsh punishments for the accused. The Schwartz family responded differently, deliberately forgoing vengeance even in the way they talked with others about the assailants. Levi Schwartz told a journalist, “If I saw the boys who did this, I would talk good to them. I would never talk angry to them or want them to talk angry to me. Sometimes I do get to feeling angry, but I don’t want to have that feeling against anyone. It is a bad way to live.” The next summer at their trials, the young men received heavy fines but only suspended jail sentences and probation, in part because the Amish asked the judge for mercy. “We believe,” began a letter endorsed by the Schwartzes and presented by their bishop, “that the four boys have suffered, and suffered heavily, since the crime, and they have more than paid for what they did. Sending the defendants to prison would serve no good purpose, and we plead for leniency for them.”
Amish people understand that evil deeds carry consequences—which are often meted out by the state—but they are keen not to allow that worldly process to entice them to seek revenge. Public statements of forgiveness, then, also serve to distinguish the response of Amish victims from a vindictive judicial process, especially when the Amish participate in that process as witnesses and cooperate with the police. That was the case, it seems, when twenty-four-year-old Michael J. Vieth of Monroe County, Wisconsin, went on a rampage against area Amish. Although doctors later described Vieth as “seriously disturbed,” he blamed his actions on a long-held grudge stemming from a time when a buggy had forced his car off the road. Since then, he had looked for a way “to get even with them.”
In November 1995, after drinking some noontime beers at a local bar, Vieth decided to drive by an Amish school and unload his anger. Pointing his rifle through the open window of his car, he shot at a buggy that had just left the school. As the bullets hit the horse, it reared up and shielded the Amish youth in the buggy from injury. Vieth fled the scene but returned later, after school had been dismissed. Brandishing a gun, Vieth abducted a fifteen-year-old young woman who had completed her Amish eighth-grade education and was now serving as an aide in the school. He drove her to a secluded location and raped her.
The young woman cooperated with the police by providing a description of the assailant. After searching for three days, police received a tip about Vieth and soon found evidence of the crime at his home, where he lived with his mother.
It was the first armed abduction in the history of Monroe County—and it was unusual for other reasons as well. The families of sexual assault victims are “usually seething mad with the perpetrator,” said the district attorney, “but that wasn’t the case here.” Instead, the district attorney found expressions of forgiveness. An Amish bishop told him, “We forgive the young man. . . . I hope he can change his life around.” “What good would it do to know why he did it?” asked another Amish man. “Can you usually figure out why God sent this or that? Not really.” “It’s not our place to judge. God is the great one,” said yet another.
After convincing the judge to give Vieth a sixty-year sentence, the district attorney admitted he was impressed with the Amish readiness to forgive, but he also considered it wishful thinking—or at least unconnected to his role as an instrument of public justice. “It’s just not the case,” he said, “that God will take care of everybody when you have a tragic situation, when there is evil, and [you] just hope to cleanse it with prayer.” As the rape victim’s father pondered the tragedy, he said, “It’s tested our faith, but hasn’t shaken it.” Still, he admitted to difficulty in dealing with his emotions as he thought about what happened to his daughter: “That’s something we have to work on.”
About the same time, not far away, another Amish reaction startled lawyers and judges. In the spring of 1996, Mahlon Lambright, an Amish carpenter from near Mondovi, Wisconsin, turned down $212,418 offered by an insurance company representing an English man whose truck had struck the Lambright buggy and killed his wife, Mary. Moreover, the media later reported, Lambright had asked a judge to dismiss a petition for a wrongful death settlement because his family was receiving all the financial help it needed from the Amish church. Another Amish man, who spoke to the press about the case, stressed an additional reason that Lambright refused a financial settlement: “It shows that he’s not seeking revenge, or he would have accepted the money. Our Bible says revenge is not for us.” In both cases, Amish victims had participated in the judicial process but distanced themselves from the outcomes, substituting forgiveness as their own response.
The stories we uncovered did not suggest that forgiveness in the aftermath of violent crime was simple or easy. Some accounts, in fact, forth-rightly mixed the theme of forgiveness with accounts of ongoing fear and the struggle to let go of anger. The 1982 murder of Naomi Huyard, the first Amish person murdered in Lancaster County history, was one such story. On the evening of November 27, fifty-year-old Naomi Huyard was killed in an especially gruesome and sexually violent way by two young men bent on imitating the murders committed by Charles Manson. One of the killers was a neighbor of the victim.
Typical of many Amish households in Lancaster County, the Huyards had rented space in an electric chest freezer at the home of a non-Amish neighbor. Naomi had gone there to retrieve some frozen food when she was attacked by the teenage son of the homeowners and an accomplice. The murder sparked a chilling fear in the female members of the Huyard family who lived in the neighborhood. For months some found it difficult to sleep; others would not walk outside or go away alone. Reflecting back on the tumultuous events, a relative remembered that, in the initial whirlwind of activity and emotional numbness that followed the killing, “we did not have time to really concentrate on trying to forgive [the killers], as some might have thought. . . . Everything still looked confusing to us.” Moreover, recalled this relative, “many people were afraid that since this happened to someone Amish, we would be so willing to forgive that we wouldn’t be concerned about [the killers] being locked up.” Such fears “were mistaken,” she wrote, “as we were very concerned about this and certainly wanted [them] locked up and taken care of by the law.”
The nature of the murder, and the protracted court trial that slowly leaked details of Huyard’s final minutes of life, deepened the agony for family members. A niece, writing two years after the events, freely admitted her struggle to forgive the killers. The Amish family also wrestled with how to relate to their neighbors. Immediately after the murder they met and cried together, and the Amish “told them it is not their fault and we do not blame them.” But later, as the parents began to insist on their son’s innocence, despite mounting evidence and an eventual court conviction to the contrary, the Huyards became angry and frustrated, and broke off most interaction with the couple.
Naomi’s niece admitted that, of the two murderers, it was harder to forgive the one who was a neighbor, because “he knew Naomi.” “But,” she said, “a Christian must forgive, yes, even the worst murderers. My thoughts were of how Jesus prayed for those who crucified Him: ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’” Even so, her written account, published a decade after the murder, contains real ambivalence. On the one hand, she concludes her story with a call to “all Christians to pray for them [convicted murderers].” On the other hand, the sexual violation of her aunt disturbed her so deeply that letting go of her anger toward the killers was obviously no easy matter. She believed that both killers were “sick,” but she had no time for their attempts to manipulate sympathy and fabricate alibis.
In other cases, the fact that the offender was a stranger may have helped make forgiveness easier and allowed victims to see wrongdoers sympathetically, as troubled but nevertheless fellow human beings. At least that was one theme in the response to a hit-and-run accident in Seymour, Missouri, in January 2000. A logging truck, trying to pass an Amish buggy on a backcountry road, crashed into the buggy, killing Leah Graber, the mother of thirteen children. Several days after Graber’s death, her family offered forgiveness to the trucker in a face-to-face conversation. They talked about friendship and about safety improvements on the local roads. “We don’t believe in pressing charges or going to courts,” said an Amish spokesperson. “Instead, let’s sit down and be friends and try to prevent this from happening again. That’s the only way to solve things.” Moreover, he noted, “It’s not our way [to press charges], we believe it’s just an accident that happened. . . . It may have been a part of God’s plan for Leah.”
Similar sentiments marked responses to a series of violent robberies in the summer of 1996 near Nappanee, Indiana. There, assailants riding in cars accosted at least twelve Amish bicyclists, knocking them off their bikes and then robbing them. At first the victims did not report the incidents. Joe Miller, who was hit and robbed of $280, said, “I forgive them, and I’d like to forget it. We all make mistakes; if we forgive we will be forgiven.”
Realizing that the drive-by robberies were not ending, one of the victims informed the police, who immediately arrested five individuals. All of them pleaded guilty. Earl Slabaugh, one of the Amish bike riders who reported an incident, went to visit the twenty-one-year-old driver of one of the cars. He told her that he had forgiven her and held nothing against her. According to news reports, she broke down and cried, crushed by her own shame and moved by this act of grace. A committee of Amish leaders and victims asked the prosecutor to convey their forgiveness at the sentencing, and numerous Amish people from the community told reporters that they were forgiving the assailants. Knowing in advance that the victims were to announce their forgiveness, the prosecutor preparing a plea bargain included a requirement that the defendants write letters of apology.
Eight days before the shooting at the West Nickel Mines School, another tragedy had visited the Amish community near Georgetown. On Sunday morning, September 24, twelve-year-old Emanuel King left his home around 5:30, as he did most mornings, to help a neighboring Amish family milk their cows. He rode his scooter out his family’s mile-long farm lane and turned right onto Georgetown Road. As he rounded a slight turn, an oncoming pickup truck crossed the center line, struck Emanuel on the far side of the road, hit a fence post, and sped away. Hearing the crash, a non-Amish neighbor came out to investigate and discovered Emanuel’s lifeless body, thrown from the site of impact.
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