York, PA -
She was meant to be looking out the window that morning, at that moment. Norina Bentzel believes that.
On Feb. 2, 2001, the principal of North Hopewell-Winterstown Elementary School was preparing to leave her office to calm a crowd of rowdy students in the cafeteria.
She had a strange feeling at the door. She turned around, went to her desk and called her youngest son at the babysitter's -- something she
Bentzel has kept the plastic ID card that hung from her neck the day of the attack in 2001. At one point, Stankewicz swiped at her abdomen, but the machete cracked the card instead of slicing her open, she said. It s a lifeline to me, she said. (Daily Record/Sunday News -- Jason Plotkin)
rarely did, especially at 11:23 a.m. when he'd be getting ready for kindergarten.
From the window over her desk, with the phone at her ear, Bentzel saw the man for the first time.
Balding and stout, he was tugging on the locked front door. Any parent familiar with the school would have known that was the wrong side, she thought.
Bentzel told her son she loved him, hung up and went to help the stranger -- a lost grandfather, she figured. A mother approached the school trailing two preschoolers. When the office buzzed her in, he followed them inside.
"Excuse me, sir," Bentzel said when she found him peering into a kindergarten classroom. "Can I help you find someone?"
The man wheeled around, pulled a 2-foot-long machete from
Police take William Stankewicz into custody after his attack at North Hopewell-Winterstown Elementary School 10 years ago. (Daily Record/Sunday News -- File)
his pant leg and raised it to strike.
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Ten years later, Bentzel says that phone call to her son Joshua was divinely inspired. If she'd gone to the cafeteria, the ruckus around her would have drowned out any shouts for help when the attack began.
"The call I was compelled to make that day put me in the place to get involved in this event," she said.
And to stop it.
Bentzel, then 41, endured blows from the machete until she could escape to her office and pound the schoolwide lockdown alarm.
Minutes later in the health suite next door, the 5-foot-2 principal leaped upon the attacker from behind, wrapping him in a bear hug. Bentzel pinned him over a desk until he relaxed. Police soon arrived.
William Michael Stankewicz
It has been 10 years since William Michael Stankewicz stole into a Red Lion-area school and terrorized students and staff. Principal Norina Bentzel, one of his victims, displays the letter she sent to Stankewicz in 2009. (Daily Record/Sunday News -- Jason Plotkin)
injured 14 that day, including 11 kindergarteners ages 5 and 6, Bentzel and two teachers. The rampage lasted mere minutes. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 132 to 264 years in prison.
Bentzel's physical injuries took more than two years to rehabilitate. Surgeons reattached two severed fingers and a partially amputated thumb. They placed a titanium plate in her shattered wrist and attempted to restore severed tendons and nerves in her hands.
Therapists worked to help her regain dexterity. She returned to school the next fall, settled into old routines and sought to restore a sense of normalcy. She re-learned to play the saxophone and type, despite limited use of several fingers.
The hard work had yet to start.
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For
a time, Bentzel, a Christian, considered whether God was punishing her for some offense.
She abandoned that theory and considered others, struggling all the time with questions. Why me? Why our school?
After much prayer, Bentzel determined she could forgive Stankewicz for what he'd done -- to her.
"I wasn't so sure about forgiving him for what he did to the children," she said.
That is, until the day in 2006 when a man barricaded himself in an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Lancaster County. Charles Roberts IV shot 10 girls, murdering five, then killed himself.
Bentzel felt horrified watching the news, then amazed, when the following day the Amish went to the killer's family to express their forgiveness.
"I made the decision after that," she said. "If they could do it, it should be easy for me."
She tried to contact Stankewicz through a state mediation program for victims of crime. Bentzel wanted him to know of her forgiveness.
The process took three years, but in March 2009 a letter from Bentzel was delivered to Stankewicz at the state prison in Fayette County, south of Pittsburgh.
In her letter, Bentzel told Stankewicz she still doesn't understand his actions and explained the hardship he caused in her life.
"After your brutal attack on me two times, I wrapped my arms around you to comfort you," she wrote. "So you see, even though we didn't know each other at all and you tried to kill me, I could still comfort you!"
She also posed several questions, including a plea for details about the store where Stankewicz tried, unsuccessfully, to buy a gun on the drive from his home in Johnson City, Tenn., to York in 2001.
If she knew the name of that store, Bentzel said in an interview, she would go there to thank the clerk or manager who ran the background check on Stankewicz that day and declined his purchase.
"Because of that clerk's actions that day, there are still 350-some children walking this earth. And because of the clerk's actions that day, there are 56 adults who are still teaching children or are moms or dads or grandparents now," she said.
"And because he didn't give that man an opportunity to buy a gun, I'm talking to you today."
Stankewicz refused to read the letter from Bentzel. Bentzel subsequently asked the letter be read to him, but she was told it wasn't a good idea.
Stankewicz, in a letter to the York Daily Record in December, reiterated his reasoning for the 2001 attack: It was an outlet for his long-sought revenge against an ex-wife, Larisa Prokuda, whose daughters once attended the school.
Of Bentzel's letter, he said, "I will never read it. I was told it was 'nice.'
"I don't care about her life, her thoughts, her emotions. I don't know her. She is meaningless to me as a human being."
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Bentzel speaks publicly about the ongoing emotional and psychological effects of traumatic events. Over the years, she has addressed trauma nurses, conferences of school counselors, even prison inmates.
Her message stresses healing and forgiveness, yet acknowledges how an unexpected image, object or scrap of news can trigger emotions that catapult her back to that day in February 2001.
Unexplained outbursts of violence, such as the recent shootings in Tucson, Ariz., prompt stomach-churning anguish. In public spaces, strangers who seem out of place can make her nervous.
In steak restaurants, she flinches upon seeing knives at her place setting. "I don't particularly like knives anymore."
A few years ago, Bentzel was leaving a wholesale-club store pushing a cart when she noticed a man near the exit. He was looking in Bentzel's direction from about 10 feet away, holding a set of pruning shears at chest level.
Panic sprang to the surface. Sweat beaded on Bentzel's skin. Her heart pounded.
"The poor guy was just standing there. My head knew that, but my body was saying, Alert!" she said.
"I told myself, as I always do, he's probably not going to kill you. He's probably not going to kill you -- probably. Because, I'm not so sure anymore."
She talked herself, step by step, into pushing her cart past him. At the sliding doors, she watched their reflection of the man, who turned and followed in her direction.
Bentzel froze in terror. She waited for him to sweep past her, presumably heading for his car.
Reflecting on the episode later, she told herself, "I have to start to learn to trust again."
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Of the 23 kindergartners in the class Stankewicz terrorized, about 16 are still in the Red Lion Area School District, now in the ninth or tenth grades.
Bentzel made it a mission to keep in touch with them, writing letters to each once a year. She tells them how she is following their progress in sports, music and academic honors. She offers to meet for lunch if they ever want to talk. Some respond, some don't.
Allen Miller, a psychologist and director of behavioral health at Wellspan, said, even though they were 5 or 6 at the time of the attack, the teenagers likely retain clear memories of it, in part because of the trauma and violence of the event and its immense exposure in the media.
"How they make sense of it now (involves) all their experiences since then, all the things they've heard, read and been said to them about it -- all might affect their memories," Miller said.
"Their recollection might be different today than what is was right after the event, although the emotion of the memory might be the same."
Bentzel recalled a quote from the last living survivor of the Alamo. Enrique Esparza was 8 when he witnessed the 1836 battle where hundreds died.
Asked whether he remembered the Alamo, Esparza, in his 70s, said:
"It is burned into my brain and indelibly seared there. Neither age nor infirmity could make me forget, for the scene was one of such horror."
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The machete attack has become legend of sorts among the families of the North Hopewell-Winterstown school.
When a new family moves to town, a neighbor inevitably fills them in on the events. Sometimes kids or parents recognize Bentzel in a re-broadcast 2008 episode of the Biography channel show "I Survived," in which she retold the story of Feb. 2, 2001.
Sometimes they call her a hero. "That's always nice to hear," she said.
She plans an open house at her home in West Manchester Township around the anniversary of the attack every year. The gathering has become a tradition.
"It's not only for the people who were there that day. It's also for my staff now, because that event is part of who we are as a school," she said.
Bentzel feels a strong bond with the school and community and hopes to someday retire from North Hopewell-Winterstown, a place she had once feared she could never tread again.
While hospitalized after the attack, she cried and cried -- not about her injuries or Stankewicz's brutality but over losing her school.
How could ever go back to the scene where she'd been so horrifically violated?
Her husband urged her to take time to heal. She now believes he was right.
"At home, later, I said, You fool, Bentzel: He took your hands as you knew them, he can't have your job," she said.
"Why would you let him have your life?"
The attack
On Feb. 2, 2001, William Michael Stankewicz, then 55, entered North Hopewell-Winterstown Elementary School with a 2-foot-long machete.
He injured 14, including 11 kindergarteners, the principal and two teachers who wrestled the weapon away and subdued him until police arrived.
Stankewicz was later sentenced to 132 to 264 years in prison. He is at the state prison in LaBelle, Fayette County, a maximum-security facility south of Pittsburgh.
In her struggle with Stankewicz, principal Norina Bentzel was severely cut on both hands and arms, incurring a shattered wrist and multiple bruises. Kindergarten teacher Linda Collier received a severe cut on her hand as she defended the children. Other injuries were less serious.
Timeline
The following is a minute-by-minute account of the machete attack at North Hopewell-Winterstown Elementary School on Feb. 2, 2001:
11:30 a.m.: A parent notices a man walking toward the front of the school.
The doorbell rings in the office, and school nurse Denise Zellers buzzes in a mother with two children, who are followed by William Michael Stankewicz.
Stankewicz pulls a machete from his left pantleg and attacks the principal near the lobby and a teacher in a kindergarten classroom.
Kindergarteners suffer minor injuries, including a broken arm, cuts, bruising and a chopped-off ponytail. There is blood in the hallway.
11:32 a.m.: York County 911 receives a call from someone at the school about a man inside chasing the school principal with a weapon.
11:34 a.m.: York County 911 receives a second call about the attack.
Principal Norina Bentzel wrestles Stankewicz and subdues him in the health suite, assisted by Zellers, who hid the machete in the hallway after Stankewicz dropped it.
Stankewicz is taken into custody by police and is non-aggressive when arrested.
11:48 a.m.: Authorities take Stankewicz to an undisclosed location.
Five children are taken to York Hospital for minor injuries, another is treated by a private physician. Three staff members are taken to Memorial Hospital.
CNN reports news of the attack, and other news media swarm the grounds, talking with parents and children.
12:30 p.m.: Children are dismissed from school, and parents of the injured students are notified. Parents arrive to pick up students.
5 p.m.: North Hopewell Township Police Chief Larry Bailets reports Stankewicz is being held on $2 million bail, noting Stankewicz has an FBI record that dates to 1996. Stankewicz is taken to York County Prison.
11 p.m.: Bentzel, flown by LifeLion to Baltimore's Union Memorial Hospital earlier in the day, remained in surgery as doctors reattached her severed fingers.
Other trauma in Red Lion
Red Lion Area School District students have dealt with traumatic events at least two other times in the past 10 years:
--- April 24, 2003: Eighth-grader James Sheets, 14, shot Principal Gene Segro and then shot himself in the head in crowded Red Lion Area Junior High School cafeteria. Sheets died at the scene. Segro was pronounced dead at the hospital.
--- Feb. 7, 2005: A 10th-grade student was charged with aggravated assault, among other charges. Police alleged he assaulted another student with a hunting knife during a class.
On the blogs
· York County, Pa., educator recounts machete attack on 'I Survived...'
