He was a soccer dad, a quiet, hardworking, church-going family man who didn’t flinch at changing diapers.
So those who knew Charlie Roberts were in a state of shock Monday when authorities named him as the suicidal gunman who shot a classroom full of girls, execution-style, in a tiny Amish schoolhouse.
“The man who did this today is not the Charlie that I’ve been married to for almost 10 years,” said Marie Roberts, 28, the gunman’s widow, in a statement released to the news media.
“My husband is loving, supportive, thoughtful, all the things you’d always want and more.”
Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, held a steady job working nights driving a truck that picked up milk from area dairy farms. According to a driver who worked with Roberts, he picked up milk from some of the farms where the children in the school lived.
Roberts, his wife and three school-age children, two boys and one girl ages about 1 to 7, lived in the tiny village of Georgetown, Pa., about 55 miles west of Philadelphia and a short drive from the school.
In her statement, Marie Roberts called her husband “an exceptional father” who took his children to soccer practice, played ball in the back yard and took his 7-year-old daughter shopping.
“He never said no when I’d ask him to change a diaper,” she said. “Our hearts are broken. Our lives are shattered, and we grieve for the innocent lives that were lost today.”
She pleaded for people to pray for the families of those slain, as well as her own.
Roberts hauled milk for the Northwest Food Products Transfer Station in East Earl, Pa., which is owned by the Land O’Lakes dairy cooperative. He had delivered milk for at least seven years, one neighbor said.
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Driving one of the gleaming steel tankers loaded with 50,000 pounds of milk is considered a solid, middle-class job in this rural community, residents say. The hours can be difficult, one community resident said, but the pay is considered good.
Morgan Erb, 15, baby-sat for the Roberts family in the summer of 2005. She said Roberts was a “nice” man who never seemed threatening but seldom spoke.
“He just wasn’t the type who would come up and talk to you,” he said.