Rachel Shannon

Kerosene lamps are used to light homes.

They do not have phones in the houses either.

Some businessmen and women do have cell phones, but they are not kept in the house.

Rather, they are kept in buildings where they can be charged.

That means that they typically won't answer a call, but they will call back when they can.

Growing up, children will attend a one-room school until the eighth grade, after which point they will go back home to receive informal education.

They also don't drive cars.

Instead, they use horse-drawn buggies.

In Fillmore County, it is very common for drivers to share the road with these buggies.

That being said, for the Miller family, at about 7.05 on the morning of September 25th, according to Menno, their family's buggy arrived to their home to pick up the children.

A little bit later in the morning, four of the children, aged 7, 9, 11, and 13, all piled into the buggy to head to school as the rest of the children continued their chores.

But tragically, those kids would never make it to school again.

By around 8.26am, emergency services received a call from a hysterical and frantic woman to report a horrific accident that just occurred on County Road 1 in Stewartville.

First responders arrived to the scene by 8.37am where they saw a silver Toyota 4Runner SUV with front end damage parked along the shoulder in the southbound lane.

There were debris along the roadway, shoulder, and within a nearby ditch.

Also in the ditch, they saw an Amish buggy and a horse which appeared to be deceased.

They then found four children.

Two children were lying on the road and two children were lying in the ditch.

It was clear that this SUV had hit the buggy and caused this horrific crash.

Later crash reconstruction concluded that the silver SUV was traveling between 63 and 71 miles per hour at the time of the crash, though the speed limit on the county road is 55 miles per hour.