Pennsylvania's Amish began to bury the victims of this week's schoolroom massacre today amid renewed concern that their private, rural way of life was yielding to modernity.
The first funeral cortege of 37 horse-drawn carriages, driven by grim-faced, black-clad Amish, trotted through the main street of Georgetown. It was only a few miles from the school where a local, non-Amish milk-truck driver shot 10 girls aged 6 to 13 on Monday, killing five of them and then himself.
The procession was headed by a buggy carrying the casket of 7-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersol. She was shot by Charles Carl Roberts, who burst into the one-room Amish school at nearby Nickel Mines on Monday, tied up the girls and shot them execution style.
Three other funerals were scheduled for today and a fifth tomorrow.
Preparations have been made for a sixth girl to be taken off life support at a Hershey hospital and brought home to die, said Rita Rhoads, a nurse-midwife who delivered two of the victims as she waited for the funeral procession.
Four others remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds.
The victims' families have forgiven the shooter, Rhoads said, in accordance with the traditionalist Christian denomination's respect for the Gospel message of forgiveness. One of the grandfathers had visited Roberts' family on Monday to convey that, and Roberts's family is expected to visit the victims' families after the funerals, she said.
Rhoads also said relatives of the victims told her that the girls showed courage in the classroom and that parents were glad they were not abused by Roberts, suspected by police of planning to molest the girls.
"They knew they were going to be shot, and nobody begged not to be shot," Rhoads said.
The mothers and other women dressed the bodies in white from head to toe, in accordance with Amish tradition, a process that gave them a chance to grieve in private, she said.