National Post (National Edition)
A crash, a community & an act of grace
When a teen driver killed an Amish elder, forgiveness was the most normal part of the ordeal
Vanessa Martin started work at the dairy farm around 6 a.m. When the milking was finished, she left and headed for her car. The sun rose red that morning. She saw it and stopped to take a photo of the clouds turning pink and orange as they hovered above the spruce trees in the field.
The 18-year-old was expected home to meet her parents before church. She left the dairy farm in her blue Volkswagen Beetle and drove east on Line 67 toward home in a neighbouring town. She’d be back at the farm later for the afternoon milking.
A kilometre ahead on the gravel road, a horse-drawn carriage was rolling toward a white house for church. She didn’t see it. The sun was hitting the road right at eye level. She felt something hit the car and pulled over. When she jumped out, she saw the black buggy’s four passengers on the road.
That Sunday in January, Randy Wagler was having church service at his house. He moved furniture into another room to make way for a set of wooden benches throughout the house. His family was part of a group of two dozen or so Old Order Amish families, all within riding distance of each other. They took turns hosting church.
By 8 a.m., churchgoers were starting to arrive in their carriages, coming up Wagler’s long lane. Standing outside the house, 500 metres from the road, he could see a black carriage on Line 67 approaching his lane. A blue Beetle was coming up behind it.
“The sun at the time was at line with the road,” he said. “I’m sure that had something to do with it.”
He lost sight of the carriage and the car as they passed behind one of the maple trees that line his lane.
“I heard the bang,” Wagler said. “After a few seconds it clued into me what happened.”
He ran down the lane to the road, past the trees on one side and the black field on the other, with strands of dead hay poking out of the dirt. It looked like the car nosed under the buggy’s big back wheel.
“The buggy would have went pretty much straight up,” Wagler said.
The carriage was ripped off the axles and lying in the black field beside the road. All four passengers were ejected. A 10-year-old boy was the only one standing. His mom and dad, Paul and Velma Albrecht, lay on the road around him. The boy’s grandfather, David Kuepfer, was fatally injured.
Two weeks later, no one was home at Randy Wagler’s white house. There was smoke coming from the chimney, though. And a set of homemade popsicles was sitting in a mould, half-frozen on a bench on the front porch beside the door.
It was worth calling on them again. A lady at the coffee shop in town said that if anyone could talk about what had happened, it would be the people who lived at the white house. They were the ones hosting church that morning.
On the second visit a few hours later, the popsicles were gone from the porch, which seemed promising. A woman answered. She smiled and chatted in the doorway for a moment, but her baby was crying in the other room. Come back around 6 o’clock, she said. Her husband Randy was at work and her father was busy weighing pigs. But they’d both seen what happened that morning. They’d be the ones to speak with.
At 6 p.m., the road outside the house was very dark, not at all illuminated by neighbouring houses in this Old Order Amish enclave in Milverton, 50 kilometres northwest of Kitchener. Randy Wagler was standing alone on the porch with a battery-powered lamp, of the sort a mechanic would hang from the inside of a car hood.
He had an office inside the barn beside his house, with a poster on the wall of a golf course and a clock that had golf balls for numbers.
He hung the flashlight on a hook, giving the room the kind of weak light good for shadows. Wagler’s three young children came across from the house and peeked through the glass in the office door.
The family in the buggy that morning were his neighbours, Wagler said. He knew them well. They lived across the field from him, in a brown-yellow farmhouse with white trim around the roof and windows.
Wagler walked into the garage beside his office, where his family kept their carriages. They were similar to the carriage that was hit, he said. That particular buggy had an open top with two rows of buttontufted leather benches, wide enough to seat two per bench. The wooden body was painted black with light green stripes around the wheels and the armrests, a signature flourish of the local carriage maker.
There was a car headlight sitting on a ledge in the garage that he had picked up from the road that day.
“There’s days you wonder, ‘Why did it have to happen?’” he said. “And then it’s, ‘Well, let’s get on with it.’”
He remembered running between the three people lying on the road, doing what he could to help until the ambulances arrived.
The teenaged driver was hovering nearby. “I was surprised she had the strength,” he said, “to stay there and hang around after what she went through.”
Wagler didn’t talk a lot. His answers were shortest when asked about forgiveness, about the small gestures in the aftermath that made things a little easier for Vanessa Martin.
It was as if to him that was the most normal part of the whole ordeal.
“It’s not something we take pride in,” he said. “I don’t think anybody thought that they weren’t going to forgive her.… It was just a mistake done by a young lady. I’m sure she wished she could go back.”
David Kuepfer was a dairy farmer. He raised six children in the brown-yellow farmhouse. His daughter Velma married Paul Albrecht and they had eight children of their own on the same property.
Paul took over the farm and David, 74, took up woodworking. He made tables and chairs. When his wife Adeline had a stroke four years ago, David took care of her.
They lived in a white trailer beside the farmhouse.
On Jan. 15, Paul was in the barn with the cows before sunrise. He milked them and fed them, cleaned out the manure and spread fresh hay in their stalls.
David came in looking for some milk for breakfast.
“He seemed in a real good mood that morning,” Paul said.
The family was due at Wagler’s house for church soon. Paul and David both dressed in black felt hats and black suit jackets with hook and eye clasps rather than buttons. All the men in their Old Order Amish church wear the same style. They call it a Mutze coat.
Paul’s wife Velma got in the back seat beside their 10-yearold son. Their two young daughters usually piled into the carriage too, but they were sick with the flu the previous night. “It was lucky they weren’t along,” Paul said.
As the carriage passed the white trailer, David came out and hopped into the front seat beside Paul.
Paul turned left out of the lane toward the Waglers’ house a kilometre away. He does not remember much after leaving his lane. He can’t remember driving down Road 136 or turning east on to Line 67. “I don’t even remember the bright sun that they told me was shining,” he said.
Paul and Velma’s three older sons started walking along the road after them. They were far enough behind that they didn’t see what happened.
Roger and Sandra Egli were drinking coffee at their kitchen table, across the road from Randy Wagler’s place, when they heard the noise.
Roger put on his work boots, grabbed his coat and ran outside. Sandra, a nurse, called 911.
Paul, Velma and David lay in the road, in a sort of L-shape. The horse, named Lady, was lying a few metres away with her eyes open, as if she was just resting.
Roger and Sandra grabbed blankets and cushions from the house. It was around -9C and the couple wanted to try to keep the injured warm as they lay on the road, waiting for ambulances.
“You don’t know if they have a neck injury or whatever,” he said. “You can’t really move ‘em.”
Roger held David’s head steady. He called David’s name over and over, but David didn’t respond. The two had been neighbours for three decades. ”Hey, help is on the way,” Roger told him. He didn’t open his eyes. “I don’t think he grasped what was going on.”
The first ambulance arrived and the paramedics chose to take David. A helicopter came to airlift Paul 90 kilometres to hospital in London, Ont. The firefighters warned the people on the ground that the wash of the helicopter blades would kick up debris, so Roger grabbed a horse blanket. “I stood on each corner and held it up and covered Paul up because he was in the open,” he said.
Another ambulance took Velma and her shaken son, who had been seated in the buggy beside her. Velma was wearing a black dress she had made, along with an apron and cape.
They had buried Paul’s father two days earlier, so she was planning to wear black for a year or so whenever she went to church or to town.
With the paramedics on scene, some of the churchgoers turned their attention to the horse. She was one of Paul’s favourites, one he chose often to do double duty ploughing his fields and carting his family to church and to town.
The men tried to get Lady up, flanking her so she wouldn’t topple. Roger was on the phone to the vet, who was looking for directions to the accident scene. The horse rose on to her front legs and took a few steps, then laid down.
“Hang on a minute,” he told the vet.
“Don’t bother,” he said, “(she) just died.”
The families kept coming in their carriages for church. They stopped at the accident and got out. They saw Vanessa Martin there, pacing.
“A lot of them were coming up to me,” she said. They told her “that the sun was very blinding.” “All in God’s time,” she remembered them saying. “This was supposed to happen.”
Her parents were on their way. But at that point, she was alone. Randy Wagler went up to her. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “I’ll be praying for you.”
“And then he gave me a big hug,” Vanessa said. “It was hard to believe, because it’s like: you just hit a buggy, like you killed someone — obviously I didn’t know in that moment that I, that somebody had died, but that’s what happened. No matter what, you can’t change that, even with all their sympathy.”
The congregation watched the three ambulances leave, one by one. Once they had left, all the churchgoers walked back up to the Wagler house, past the maple trees in the lane and the stubbled field, and started the service. They did not know that David Kuepfer had died in hospital. “But he was pretty much gone when he left,” Wagler said.
The church service was shorter, tailored to what had just happened.
The preacher’s message, Wagler said, was “just more or less that we should be ready like we’re hoping David was when his time came, if it should happen to one of us.”
On the night of the crash, Randy Wagler called Vanessa’s house to tell them that David died in hospital.
The next day, Vanessa’s father Dale went to visit Paul and Velma at their house. He brought doughnuts and a potted plant. Paul was just back from hospital, recovering from head trauma.
“This is the crazy part,” Dale said. “The first question was, ‘How is Vanessa?’”
Neighbours came that day too. They milked the cows and fed them, cleaned out the manure and spread fresh hay in their stalls. More church members came the following days. They worked out the timing with Paul and Velma’s sons, to make sure the boys always had help with work around the farm.
One of the neighbours was appointed to organize the preparations for the funeral, to take care of preparing the house and moving furniture to make way for wooden benches. Another was appointed head cook, to manage the meal for the funeral.
That week, one of the church members sent Vanessa a message. The viewing was on Thursday, the woman told Vanessa, and the funeral was on Friday.
“It felt like they were opening the door,” Vanessa’s father said. “It felt like the right thing to do.”
Randy Wagler was at Paul and Velma Albrecht’s farmhouse for the viewing. He saw the Martins drive up. “They may feel out of place,” he remembered thinking. So he went up to them, told them what was happening and showed Vanessa and her parents where to go.
“We call him an angel,” Vanessa’s mother Charlene said.
Wagler walked with Vanessa and her parents up to the trailer where David lived. There was a lineup outside the trailer, maybe 15 metres long. David’s body was inside, in a plain wooden casket draped with black cloth on the outside and white cloth on the inside. His family was sitting beside the casket, shaking hands as the line of people proceeded slowly through the trailer.
When it came Vanessa and her parents’ turn to walk through, Velma grasped their hands.
“It’s okay,” Vanessa remembered her saying.
They did not sing hymns at the funeral. A preacher read out a hymn, but there was no music.
Hundreds of people arrived at the farm. They were seated throughout two big rooms in Paul and Velma’s house and when that was full, they streamed into the trailer. Preachers led services in each home simultaneously.
Vanessa Martin sat with her parents and her boyfriend on one of the wooden benches set up across two rooms in David Kuepfer’s trailer. The Old Order Amish community in Milverton is split into districts, with a bishop looking after each one. The districts each have a set of backless, wooden benches, which get carted around for church services or funerals.
Arnold Jantzi, David’s nephew, was seated in front of Vanessa. From where Jantzi was sitting, little indications of how David lived stood out to him. He could see David’s desk with a little bookshelf sitting on top.
“You could see the books he would have used for study. You see, he was a deacon,” Jantzi said. Among them was a copy of Martyr’s Mirror, a thick, 17th century collection of stories about Christians, particularly Anabaptists, who were killed for their beliefs.
The first preacher gave what’s called the opening. The second preacher spoke for three quarters of an hour. It was all in German. They spoke about death, about two ways to spend eternity: one in hell, one in heaven.
“You face death,” Jantzi said. “This is, you know, a calling of God. It’s God’s time. We don’t dispute that, we don’t argue.”
Vanessa did not understand German. Her parents, both Mennonites, grew up with Pennsylvania Dutch as their first language. They understood the odd German word. There was one woman, however, who was taking notes on the funeral service. She translated it into English and sent a letter to the Martins, so they would understand what went on.
After service, the mourners lined up and started walking through the farmhouse, passing David in the casket.
Outside, some of the young men harnessed the horses. They placed the casket on a carriage, which led the way to the graveyard, with the family in carriages close behind.
At the gravesite, four men lowered the plain box into the ground using leather straps and took shovels to bury it.
The bishop took Vanessa aside.
“If you ever need someone to talk to,” she recalled him saying.
There was not much frost on the ground. They bury even in the coldest weather.
Paul Albrecht’s son answered the door. He closed it again and went to fetch Paul.
“Come in,” Paul said when he got to the door.
His eyes are pale blue and he has a thick brown beard fading into grey near the edges. He wore suspenders over a linen shirt.
“I look a lot better than I did,” he said. “When I came home I had two big black eyes.”
It was a month after the accident and he still seemed bewildered at the gap in his memory, blacking out the time between leaving the lane and returning home from the hospital days later with a concussion. The details of that morning were starting to come back or maybe it was just bits of the stories the neighbours had told him, congealing into memories.
“I don’t remember what we talked of as we went up the road or nothing,” he said. “It just must have been about the weather. I don’t know.”
He doesn’t remember hearing Vanessa Martin’s blue Beetle coming up behind them, which seems odd because it’s a sound he’s especially attuned to. But it doesn’t much matter anymore; Paul and his family were worried about Vanessa.
“I don’t feel no anger,” he said. “I’d a lot sooner have it be me than her. This is going to be on your mind all the time.”
The Ontario Provincial Police charged Vanessa Martin with careless driving, an offence under the Highway Traffic Act, not a criminal charge. She is to appear in provincial offences court on March 14.
“(David) would have never charged her,” Paul said. “It would have been all forgiveness with him. An accident’s an accident.”
After the funeral, Vanessa Martin’s mom brought Paul and Velma a chicken noodle casserole and some chocolate chip cookies. She knew what the couple and their family had done for her daughter, knew how their little gestures had eased a desperately hard situation.
“We know (Vanessa) didn’t try it,” Velma said. “I just know that I forgive her. It’s just there.”
He and his wife Velma sat at a wooden table in the centre of a big room with a fireplace off to one side. Their sons sat behind them listening, chiming in occasionally to remind their dad about one detail or another. They usually spoke German in the house, but spoke English for the visitors with them at the table.
There were flowers hanging above the table in the Albrecht house, clipped to an old bicycle wheel with clothes pins. “People just brought them at the viewing,” Paul said. “I don’t know why they’re on there. That’s usually what they use to hang laundry on, like socks or something.”
“When they’re just dried we’re going to put them in a vase again, keep it forever,” Velma said.
She spoke about her father, David, with heavy pauses in between sentences. He left behind his wife Adeline of 52 years, his children, 27 grandchildren and eight greatgrandchildren.
“He could make people laugh,” Velma said.
He read to his young granddaughters from storybooks, sometimes changing the words to see whether they would notice.
“And the girls knew better,” Velma said. “They enjoyed that.” Life and faith in an Amish Mennonite family, A11