On the night of Oct. 4, Myron and Arlene Miller were asleep in their home in Mechanicstown, Ohio, when they heard a knock on the door. According to their friend Bob Comer, when Myron came downstairs, he found five men standing on his doorstep.
"They pulled him out in the front yard, and they have scissors and a battery-powered shaver and everything," Comer says. "They're trying to hold him down and cut his beard off and cut his hair off."
Miller yelled at his wife to call 911. Then the men let him go and ran back to the trailer and had the driver take off, Comer says.
Myron Miller, who declined an interview, was left with a ragged beard: a shameful state for an Amish man.
"The beard for Amish men is a symbol of their adult manhood," says Donald Kraybill, a sociologist at Elizabethtown College and author of several books about the Amish, including Amish Grace and Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites.