Fourth girl dies after Amish school shooting [+video]

An Amish wagon rolls past police at the scene of a school shooting in the town of Nickel Mines. Picture / Reuters

NICKEL MINES, Pennsylvania - A dairy truck driver with a grudge burst into a one-room Amish schoolhouse on Monday and killed three girls execution style before committing suicide in the third deadly US school shooting in the past week, authorities said.

Eight other girls were taken to hospital, three of them in a critical condition and CNN reported that one of them died several hours after the assault.

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Charles Carl Roberts IV, aged 32, took about a dozen girls hostage in the rural Pennsylvania school and barricaded the doors with boards before killing the girls and himself.

Roberts, who was not Amish, had dropped his own three school-aged children at their bus stop in the morning, showing no sign of the rampage to come, Commissioner Jeffrey Miller of Pennsylvania state police said at a news conference.

Roberts called his wife to say he wasn't coming home and that he had left suicide notes for her and the children to explain his actions, Mr Miller added.

"He was angry with life and was angry at God. ... There may have been a loss of a child at some point in his life," Miller said, declining to elaborate.

A witness told the Lancaster New Era newspaper that the gunman pulled up in a pickup truck outside the Georgetown School and ran into the schoolroom where several children were doing their lessons. The witness said he was rambling nonsensically and smoking a pipe.

The teacher and some visitors fled and ran to a nearby farm for help.

The classroom had 26 students aged 6 to 13. Roberts ordered the 15 boys and an adult female who was pregnant to leave with three other adult females who had infant children with them.

While a hostage negotiator was trying to call the Robert's cell phone, Roberts opened fire and about 10 police troopers stormed the building. They found the gunman dead along with the bodies of three girls.

Mr Millar said the victims had been shot "at close range, executive style, firing into the back of the head".

Roberts fired three rounds from a shotgun and 13 from a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, police said. He also had a rifle, 600 rounds of ammunition, a stun gun, two knives and tools including a hammer, a hacksaw, pliers, wire, eye-bolts, rolls of tape and a bucket with a change of clothes.

Mr Millar said the three girls who died at the scene appeared to have been two students and a teacher's aide - an older girl.

"It's a horrendous crime scene," he said. "One of the children died in the arms of one of our troopers."

A hospital spokesman at Lancaster General Hospital said the critically ill children had gunshot wounds to the head and the other to the upper body.

He told the Philadelphia Inquirer that a doctor who handled the cases said the wounds indicated they were from close range and intentional.

"This was not a wild shoot," the spokesman said.

The shooting occurred in a normally placid, rural community where Amish farmers live simply, shunning modern machines and vehicles including cars, travel by horse and buggy and cultivate their land using traditional methods.

Tourists visit the area to buy antiques and old-fashioned quilts.

Crime-free

The community was shocked by the shooting.

Aaron Meyer, owner of a local buggy company, told CNN: "In this township of about 30,000 people, we have no police. Because there's just virtually no crime. Many of these townships here have no police at all."

"It was terrible. I felt like crying. I never dreamt that I would see it in a one-room schoolhouse," said Jake King, 56, an Amish man, who lives near the school.

Daniel Beiler, 30, said the incident was having a "severe impact" on the community of about 300 people.

"I just don't know how to react to it yet," he said. "I'm just in a daze. We've never had a problem like this before. It makes us a lot more close-knit community."

The Pennsylvania shooting followed reports earlier in the day of lockdowns at two Las Vegas area schools as police searched for an armed youth, local television reported.

Recent shootings at US schools and universities

Here is a chronology of some of the major shootings inside US schools and universities in recent years:

* September 29, 2006 - A 15-year-old student killed his school's principal in western Wisconsin after telling another student "you better run".

* September 27, 2006 - A drifter took six female high school students hostage in Bailey, Colorado, molested them and then shot one to death and killed himself as police closed in.

* March 2005 - A 16-year-old high school student gunned down five students, a teacher and a security guard at Red Lake High School in far northern Minnesota before killing himself. He also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion elsewhere on the Chippewa Indian reservation.

* January 2002 - A student who had been dismissed from the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, killed the dean, a professor and a student, and wounded three others.

* April 1999 - Two student gunmen killed 12 other students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, before killing themselves.

* March 1998 - At Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, two boys aged 13 and 11 set off the fire alarm and killed four students and a teacher as they left the school.

- REUTERS, NZHERALD STAFF