Washington - A gunman walked into an Amish one-room school in Pennsylvania Monday, killing three girls execution-style with shots to the head after sending out the boys and barricading the doors.
Another seven girls were seriously wounded, many of them in the head, and airlifted to special regional hospitals across two states, where two children were in 'dire critical condition on life support,' said Colonel Jeffrey Miller, commissioner of Pennsylvania State Police, in an interview with Cable News Network late Monday afternoon.
'It would would take a miracle not to lose more lives today,' he said.
The gunman, who was not a member of the Amish religious sect that settled from Germany and Switzerland to southeastern Pennsylvania 200 years ago in search of religious freedom, then turned the gun on himself, police said.
The violent events at the school run by one of America's most well-known religious communities was the third US school shooting in less than a week. Last week, a gunman killed a high school girl at a Colorado high school after sexually assaulting six girls, and a student killed a principal in a small Wisconsin town.
But Miller discounted speculation that the shooting at the school near Paradise, in Lancaster County, was a 'copy cat' case. The shooter, Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, told his wife on a cell phone shortly before pulling the trigger that he was exacting revenge for something that happened when he was a child.
'This was a target of opportunity, as far as we know,' Miller said. 'I don't think he had anything against the Amish community. I think it was about ... what happened in his life previously.'
Miller earlier described a 'horrendous crime scene.' The dead included two female students and a female classroom aide.
Lancaster County coroner earlier put the death toll at six, according to KYW radio of Philadelphia.
The shootings occurred before 11 am in the farming town of Nickle Mines, Lancaster County, in the 27-student one-room Amish School that housed Grades 1 to 8. Amish children, who grow up without electricity, cars or telephones, usually quit school when they are 14 years old.
Miller said the shooter left suicide notes at his home just a stone's throw from the school, drove up in a borrowed pickup truck, and went into the yellow one-room school waving a gun.
The shooter bound the girls' feet together with 'wire ties and flex cuffs,' then finally sent the 15 boys and four women - three of them with infants in arm, the fourth pregnant - out of the building, Miller said.
The female teacher used the opportunity to 'sneak' out of the school house and rush to a nearby house to use the telephone, Miller said, but at least a half an hour had already passed into the crisis.
The girls were last seen by witnesses with their feet bound, standing and facing the blackboard.
Roberts then boarded up all the doors with pieces of wood he had taken with him, Miller said.
Police raced to the scene and tried to negotiate, but Roberts threatened to start shooting if they did not move away within 10 seconds, Miller said. As police prepared to storm the school, Roberts began shooting the girls, with automatic hand gun fire, 'execution style in the head,' before killing himself.
Police had to break through windows to get to the bloody scene because the doors were blocked with the wood pieces and desks.
'It was obvious this was a premeditated hostage scenario where he intended not to walk out alive and also intended to kill innocent victims,' Miller said.
Prior to the assault, Roberts apparently finished his work by 3 am Monday, picking up milk in a cooled tanker truck from the many farms owned by Amish and non-Amish farmers. He got up in the morning, walked his three children to their school bus stop, then left 'rambling' suicide letters for them.
'It seems he wanted to attack young female victims,' Miller said.
The Amish religious sect - one of the Protestant pietistic churches that left Germany during the 18th Century in search of religious freedom - spurns electricity and motorized vehicles in their farming communities.
Horse-drawn ploughs cultivate the fields, and during the days of the military draft, young Amish boys were exempted from service as conscientious objectors to violence.
Amish speak a dialect of German called Pennsylvania Dutch but learn English at school so they can function within the greater community, where they sell their harvests directly to the public. There are about 30,000 Amish in the county's population of 450,000.
Televised images showed clusters of Amish leaning together and weeping outside on a brisk fall morning - the women in long black dresses with bright coloured aprons and white bonnets, the men in straw hats and suspenders.
Rescue workers were combing the fields, followed by a herd of white horses, possibly looking for children who had fled, television footage showed.
The community is 90 kilometres west of Philadelphia.
© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
