Pennsylvania Police Investigate Gentleman Living With 12 Girls

Lee Kaplan, 51, fathered two babies with teen girl

[From article]
A 51-year-old Bucks County man was arrested after he was found living with 12 girls, including a teenager he considered his wife, and a baby and a toddler he fathered with her, authorities said Friday.
Lee Kaplan was arrested at his home in the 400 block of Old Street Road in Lower Southampton Township on Thursday morning after an anonymous tip led county child welfare workers and police to his door, said Lt. John Krimmel.
Some of the children were hiding in the small house.
"We kept finding more children," Krimmel said. "It's just a crazy situation."
The oldest girl, now 18, told police she was the mother of two of the girls, a 3-year-old and a 6-month-old, Krimmel said.



The teen's parents, Daniel and Savilla Stoltzfus, of Quarryville, Lancaster County, also were arrested after they told police they had "gifted" their daughter to Kaplan four years ago.
The girl was 14 at the time, and Daniel Stoltzfus gave her to Kaplan as thanks "for helping his family out of financial ruin," according to the criminal complaints.
The couple said they were the parents of all of the children except the two youngest, who were their grandchildren, said Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler.
Heckler said they were still investigating how the other nine children came to be living with Kaplan, and whether any of them may have been abused.
"We've got a ways to go to figure out what's really going on here," Heckler said.
Heckler described the Stoltzfuses as "straightforward." They told police they were going to lose their farm until Kaplan "comes along and gives them money somehow," possibly employing Daniel Stoltzfus in a scrap business.
Once their farm was saved, Daniel Stoltzfus, now 43, did some Internet research and concluded that it was legal to give their daughter to Kaplan, Heckler said.
Savilla Stoltzfus, 42, was at Kaplan's house when the child-welfare check was made, Heckler said.
The Stoltzfuses "think he's a wonderful man," Heckler said. Some of the also girls said good things about Kaplan, Heckler said, describing them as "brainwashed" by Kaplan.
Kaplan and the 18-year-old were not married, but Heckler said they acted as husband and wife.
The girls apparently did not attend school and it was unclear if they had ever been to a doctor, Heckler said. They did not appear to be in bad health and did not show visible signs of trauma, he said.
[. . .]
Police were unable to find birth certificates for any of the children and said they did not have Social Security numbers, he said.
Heckler said all of the children are in protective custody and are together.
Kaplan and the Stoltzfuses are each being held on $1 million bail.
Kaplan was charged with two counts of statutory sexual assault and related offenses. Daniel Stoltzfus was charged with criminal conspiracy and endangering the welfare of children. Savilla Stoltzfus was charged with endangering the welfare of children.
The Stoltzfuses were born into the Amish religion, but renounced it amid a years-long fight with community elders, according to a federal lawsuit they filed in 2009 against their former church. In the complaint, the Stoltzfuses said they had 11 children and had owned their family property on Pumping Station Road in Kirkwood, Lancaster County, since 1997. They operated a metal working business on the property. They suggested that sect leaders, among other things, frowned on them for doing business "with an individual of the Jewish faith named Lee Kaplan," the complaint says.
[. . .]
Jen Betz, a 37-year-old mother of two young children, said she was the neighbor who called a child-welfare hotline about Kaplan.
She called Bucks County Children and Youth on Wednesday because she was concerned about the girls - some 7 or 8, some in their young teens - she saw at his house, which she noticed had boarded windows and high weeds.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20160618_Bucks_man_arrested_after_12_girls_found_in_his_home__including_2_he_fathered_with_a_14-year-old__police_say.html

Police: Parents admit 'gifting' teen to Bucks man; all 3 arrested

Updated: JUNE 17, 2016 — 9:25 PM EDT

by Robert Moran, Justine McDaniel and Michaelle Bond, STAFF WRITERS

Cambridge, MA, the Un-Community


This writer is correct. In Cambridge there is no support for individuals by other individuals. The city is dominated by academics who are the most competitive humans on earth. They thrive and delight in another's suffering. Collectivism rules in Cambridge and other cities. If you are a member of a group of preferred victims you may get support. But if not you are ignored and the predators are free to devour. Look to the successes of the Amish and Mennonite communities. They support each other unlike the secular humanists in Cambridge.

http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x1593365603/Guest-commentary-Community-is-ultimate-answer-to-recession-malaise

Guest commentary: Community is ultimate answer to recession malaise
By Peter Pruyn
Cambridge Chronicle
Mon Mar 09, 2009, 04:00 PM EDT

Looking in All the Wrong Places

Looking in All the Wrong Places

Kocieniewski and Gately report "Mr. Roberts had no criminal record or history of psychiatric illness, the authorities said." (DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI and GARY GATELY, "Man Shoots 11, Killing 5 Girls, in Amish School," The New York Times, October 3, 2006) Do they suggest and do the Times' editors believe that if there was a history of mental illness that would explain what he did? Many articles promote the psychiatric industry and drug treatment in the. Maintaining an irrational explanation for violence blaming made up illnesses shows that the august Times is living in the Middle Ages with respect to psychiatry.
The public discourse on psychiatry is controlled by industry interests promoting nonsensical ideas. Journalists join police and prosecutors demonizing persons accused of psychiatric illnesses. There is as much evidence that psychiatric illness causes violence as there is that writing for the New York Times causes violence. You may want to look to drugs as the cause of violence even if it does affect the stock prices of drug companies.
--
Roy Bercaw, Editor
ENOUGH ROOM
Cambridge MA USA

October 3, 2006
The New York Times
Man Shoots 11, Killing 5 Girls, in Amish School
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI and GARY GATELY

NICKEL MINES, Pa., Oct. 2 — A dairy truck driver, apparently nursing a 20-year-old grudge, walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse here Monday morning and systematically tried to execute the girls there, killing four and wounding seven before killing himself, the police said. [A fifth child died in a Delaware hospital early Tuesday of wounds from the shooting, The Associated Press reported.] The heavily armed gunman first ordered the 15 boys in the room to leave, along with several adults, and demanded that the 11 girls line up facing the blackboard. As the gunman lashed the students’ legs together with wire and plastic ties, the teacher dashed from the room and called the police around 10:35 a.m.
The gunman, identified as Charles C. Roberts, 32, killed himself as the police stormed the West Nickel Mines Amish School, which is set back in a cornfield on a street of stone houses, barns and silos in Lancaster County, about 50 miles west of Philadelphia. Several of the wounded were in critical condition in area hospitals.
“He wanted to find female victims,” said Col. Jeffrey B. Miller, commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police. “This was a target of opportunity.” Mr. Roberts had no criminal record or history of psychiatric illness, the authorities said. But notes he left at his home — where he lived with his wife, Marie, and their three children — said he was distraught about a slight that had occurred more than 20 years ago.
The police would not describe the incident that had upset him. But Colonel Miller said Mr. Roberts, who lived near the school but was not Amish, did not appear to have been motivated by religious bias. The police said they were looking into a report that the couple lost an infant daughter in 1997.
When Mr. Roberts arrived at the school shortly before 10:30 a.m., he was carrying a 9-millimeter handgun, Colonel Miller said, and asked the teacher, “Have you seen anything like this?” referring to the weapon. “Can you help me find it?” When the state police arrived around 10:45, Mr. Roberts had barricaded the doors with bolts and lumber he had brought in his pickup truck, Colonel Miller said. After a brief cellphone exchange with his wife and then with the state police, Mr. Roberts began shooting, aiming the handgun and a shotgun at the children as they stood lined in front of the room.
As the police began charging the building around 11, Mr. Roberts fired a shot into his head, Colonel Miller said. “He was angry with life; he was angry at God,” Colonel Miller said. “It appears he chose this school because it was close to his home, it had the female victims he was looking for, and it probably seemed easier to get into than some bigger school.” The rampage was the third fatal shooting at a United States school in the past week but seemed nearly incomprehensible to many residents of the Amish community, where crime rates are so low that many homeowners do not lock their doors and many towns have no police force.
The Amish community in Pennsylvania, which numbers about 55,000, lives an agrarian lifestyle, shunning technological advances like electricity and automobiles. And many say their insular lifestyle gives them a sense that they are protected from the violence of American society. But as residents gathered near the school, some wearing traditional garb and arriving in horse-drawn buggies, they said that sense of safety had been shattered.
“If someone snaps and wants to do something stupid, there’s no distance that’s going to stop them,” said Jake King, 56, an Amish lantern maker who knew several families whose children had been shot. Mr. Roberts’s relatives said they, too, were stunned by his violent outburst and had had no indication that he had been planning any attack. His wife issued a written statement offering sympathy to the families of his victims and said she could not reconcile the day’s events with the man she had loved. Her statement was read by a family friend, Dwight Lefever, and described Mr. Roberts as a devoted father who had always taken the time to play with his three children, ferry them to soccer practice and birthday parties, and had “never once refused to help change a diaper.”
“The man that did this thing is not the Charles I was married to for nearly 10 years,” Mrs. Roberts said in the statement. The police did not release the names of the victims but said all had been girls from 6 to 13. Once the police entered the building, they found a cache of weapons and supplies that indicated Mr. Roberts had prepared for a long siege. He had a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, two shotguns, a stun gun, two knives, two cans of gunpowder and 600 rounds of ammunition. In a toolbox near his body, the police discovered bolts he had used to barricade the school doors with two-by-fours, pliers and wires he had used to bind the girls’ legs. Another five-gallon bucket he brought into the building contained earplugs, bathroom tissue and a clean change of clothing, the police said. Mr. Roberts lived just over a mile from the school in the town of Bart, in a modular home that had a trampoline and sandbox in the yard and was already decorated for Halloween.
Neighbors said he was jovial and generally well liked, and they were struggling to understand what had driven him to violence. “I am dying to know what kind of insult from a girl 20 years ago could have led to this,” said Mary Miller, who lived on his street. The police said, however, that Mr. Roberts’s co-workers had noticed changes in his behavior over the past several months. While he had long been known as an upbeat and outgoing person, this year he began to appear sullen, his co-workers told the police. Then, late last week, Mr. Roberts once again appeared upbeat at work, Colonel Miller said.
“We think that’s when he decided to do what he did,” Colonel Miller said. “It’s like his worries and burdens were lifted from him.” The police said most of Mr. Roberts’s weapons appeared to be legal. He bought the 9-millimeter semiautomatic, which he fired at least 13 times during his rampage, from a store five miles from the schoolhouse in 2004. The shotguns and ammunition also appeared to be legal, the police said, although it was not clear whether his possession of a stun gun violated any law. The police said Mr. Roberts had bought the ammunition and other supplies from area stores over the past several months, so there was no glaring sign that might have alerted store owners that he was about to burst out in violence.
The police said Mr. Roberts called his wife from a cellphone while he was inside the school just moments before the shooting. During the call, Colonel Miller said, Mr. Roberts made a reference to the grievance that he blamed for his despair, then told her: “The police are here. I’m not coming home.” Colonel Miller said that once the gunfire began troopers charged the building and broke in through several windows in the school. By the time they arrived, however, the children lay dead or wounded in the front of the classroom and Mr. Roberts’s body was a few feet away. One child died in the arms of a trooper as he rushed her out of the building to get medical help, Colonel Miller said. Lancaster County school officials held an emergency meeting last night to try to ease the concerns of school administrators and parents unnerved by the shooting.
County officials said that despite the bloodshed, residents should be confident that most of the schools were safe. That reassurance gave little comfort, however, to people like Dwylin Bieler, 42, whose 8-year-old daughter played with one shooting victim. “You think something like this will never happen, especially in a place like this,” said Mr. Bieler, who is Mennonite, and says the Amish community makes him and others feel welcome. “You pray that it won’t happen. But you just never know. You can’t know. And that’s hard to accept.”

I'm Having a Harvard Vision

I'm Having a Harvard Vision

MacINTOSH and Sheehy, report "Harvard psychology Professor William Pollack said the bloodshed may have prompted Roberts to seek revenge now. 'Seeing someone else enact it, certainly that would open up the gates,' he said." (JEANE MacINTOSH in Paradise, Pa., and KATE SHEEHY in New York, "SLAUGHTER AT AMISH SCHOOL," New York Post, October 3, 2006) Yes and eating Twinkies may have prompted revenge as well.
Here is a pompous Harvard psychologist speculating on why a man he never met committed a crime. Yet the New York Post wastes ink to print this nonsense. Is it any wonder why people have such a low opinion of psychiatrists and journalists? This must explain why Harvard is so prestigious in the world as an education institution.
Is what Prof. Pollack does called remote viewing?
--
Roy Bercaw, Editor
ENOUGH ROOM
Cambridge MA USA

SLAUGHTER AT AMISH SCHOOL
By JEANE MacINTOSH in Paradise, Pa., and KATE SHEEHY in New York
New York Post
October 3, 2006
-- A maniacal milkman harboring an adolescent grudge from 20 years ago systematically separated the girls from the boys in a one-room schoolhouse in Amish country yesterday and then shot the girls, execution-style, in the head, killing at least four. "The police are here, but I'm not coming home," deranged dad Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, ominously warned his wife via cellphone from inside the tiny, yellow West Nickel Mine Amish School in Paradise, Pa., moments before the slaughter and suicide.
At least six other young female students were wounded, including three critically. A choked-up police spokesman last night said that "it would take a miracle" for all of them to pull through, describing the condition of one as "very, very dire."
Roberts pumped bullets into the heads of the terrified schoolgirls - at least one as young as 6 - at point-blank range after herding them to the front of the room, lining them up next to each other in front of the blackboard and binding their feet with wire. In a chilling twist, Roberts had placed a brief phone call to his wife, Marie, at around 11 a.m., just before his bloody siege, saying "he was acting out in a way to achieve revenge for something that happened 20 years ago," according to Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller.
Roberts, who is not Amish, would have been around 12 at that time. He was not targeting the insular religious community but instead apparently picked the school simply because it was around the corner from his home in Bart, it was easy to enter - and it had the victims he was looking for, Miller said. "It seems as though he wanted to attack young female victims," Miller said. "That's the only reason we can figure that he went to the school. "This is a horrendous, horrific incident for the Amish community," Miller added, referring to the pacifist group famous for its horse-drawn buggies and gentle folk sporting straw hats in Lancaster County. "They're solid citizens in the community. They're good people. They don't deserve . . . no one deserves this."
Stunned authorities in the bucolic, farm-rich region - where modern conveniences such as phones, TVs and cars are shunned - added that Roberts had seemingly begun his day like any other, dropping off one of his young sons and a daughter at a school-bus stop at around 8:45 a.m. Still, a neighbor who drops her kids off at the same stop said Roberts did one thing out of the ordinary before the massacre. After putting his kids on the bus, "he seemed like he lingered," resident Paula Derby said. She said Roberts then asked the driver to let his children off the vehicle for a minute again, and as they stepped off, "he said, 'Come here and give Daddy a hug.' " He quickly added, "Remember, Daddy loves you," as the kids got back on the bus and it drove off, Derby recalled.
It had been a little more than five hours since Roberts finished working his night shift at the Northwest Food dairy. His job was to collect unprocessed milk from the surrounding Amish farms and take it back to the Land O' Lakes-owned dairy, The Washington Post reported, making it possible that he knew some of his victims. By 10 a.m., the deeply disturbed man was headed for his nightmare showdown with police, clearly braced for a siege he expected to last for a while, cops said. Roberts backed up his pickup truck to the school and entered, armed with a 9mm handgun, 12-gauge shotgun and rifle.
On his belt he carried a heavy sack containing 600 rounds of ammo, a stun gun, two knives and two cans of gunpowder. He also lugged with him several planks of plywood, plastic and wire twist ties, rolls of tape, assorted tools, a change of clothes and a pail containing earplugs and toilet paper. Once inside, Roberts bizarrely first acted as if he just wanted to show the kids his guns, police said. "Have you seen anything like this?" he said, waving the 9mm, according to cops.
"Can you help me find it?" He then began methodically separating the 15 boys from the dozen girls. The school, about an hour's drive west of Philadelphia, teaches first through eighth grades, and the kids ranged in age from 6 to 13. After a few minutes, the psycho killer freed the boys, their female teacher, a pregnant woman and three other women with infants. He barricaded the door with the plywood, and piled up the school desks against it for extra measure. Then he lined up the girls, including a 15-year-old teacher's aide. Within minutes, Roberts "apparently executed them . . . firing in rapid succession," Miller said.
The murderer then shot himself in the head moments before police sharpshooters - hearing the gunfire that killed the girls - stormed the building. Two of the schoolgirls, still bound near the blackboard, died instantly, as did Roberts, who was found face-down on the floor, officials said. A third girl died shortly after in the room, cradled in a state trooper's arms. One of the dead was the young teacher's assistant, cops said.
Fern Stork, whose daughter is married to one of Roberts' three brothers, described the killer as typically a "very quiet" but devoted family man. "Charlie was nice, friendly, pleasant . . . real involved with looking after the children," she said."He must have been carrying around a burden that no one knew about." Roberts' co-workers noted that he had grown sullen earlier this year, refusing to share a quick joke or even talk to them or customers, as he was used to doing.
But they told cops that by late last week, he was back to his more jovial self. "We think that's when he decided to do what he did," Miller said, according to The New York Times. "It's like his worries and burdens were lifted from him." Based on the rambling suicide notes he scribbled to his wife and kids, and his call to his spouse, Roberts was clearly "angry at life, he was angry at God," Miller said. "I can't go on anymore," the distraught dad told his wife.
Miller said authorities were checking into the death of one of the couple's daughters, who died as an infant in 1997. According to an obituary that ran in the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal on Nov. 15, 1997, Roberts and his wife had had a baby girl, Elise Victoria, who died at Lancaster General Hospital "shortly after birth." Miller also noted that Roberts was supposed to take a periodic drug test yesterday but added that it was unclear if that might have had anything to do with the attack.
Police said Roberts' wife first became alarmed after she arrived home in the morning and discovered his notes to her and to each of their children: an infant boy, a 4-year-old son and a daughter, 7. She immediately tried to call his cellphone, but he didn't answer, Miller said. When he finally did call her, "he told her loved her" and cryptically said he wanted to avenge the past incident, Miller said.
During the tense standoff with cops, Roberts called 911 and warned the operator to tell police to back off. Troopers heard gunfire from inside the building moments later. A spokesman for Roberts' wife later read a heart-wrenching statement from her: "The man who did this today was not the Charlie I've been married to for almost 10 years. He was loving, supportive, thoughtful, all the things you would want and more. "He was an excellent father. He took our kids to soccer practice and games, played ball in the back yard and took our 7-year-old daughter shopping. He never said no when I asked him to change a diaper.
"Our hearts are broken, our lives are shattered, and we grieve for the innocence and lives that were lost today. Above all, please pray for the families who lost children and please pray, too, for our family and children." The attack was the third fatal school shooting in the country in less than a week. Last week, a gunman singled out several girls and shot one of them dead before committing suicide in Bailey, Colo. A school principal also was fatally shot in Cazenovia, Wis., by a disgruntled student.
Harvard psychology Professor William Pollack said the bloodshed may have prompted Roberts to seek revenge now. "Seeing someone else enact it, certainly that would open up the gates," he said. Last night, the Amish community was still trying to fathom the horror. "I thought always my community was safe," said an Amish woman as she stood with her three kids near the school. "We hear that this happens all over the world, so I guess it would be presumptuous of us. For some reason, this man decided to go against God. He made a choice."
With Post Wire Services jeane.macintosh@nypost.com