"We're very, very sad, and we're very sad for his family, especially," said Lari Walker, a neighbor so close to the Lapps that she hesitated to say more lest she show disrespect for his loved ones.
"Glen was just a beautiful person," Walker said. "He loved other people, and he loved helping people."
He leaves behind his mother, Mary, his father, Marvin, and two brothers.
Mary Lapp declined to take questions when reached at home last night, instead referring media calls to the Mennonite aid organization with which her son had been serving.
"They're really suffering," Cheryl Zehr Walker, the group's director of communications, said last night of the Lapps.
Lapp, 40, was among 10 medical volunteers whose bullet-riddled bodies were found Friday in northern Afghanistan: six Americans, two Afghans, a German, and a Briton. The workers had spent several weeks delivering medical aid to villagers. They were ambushed on the way back to the capital city, Kabul.
The Taliban and a lesser-known insurgent group claimed responsibility and accused the group of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Lapp, one of two of the Mennonite organization's volunteers working in Afghanistan with partner agencies, had been part of an "eye camp" medical team that had been delivering treatments and tests for eye diseases, according to the group's statement.
The Mennonite group describes itself as a Christian relief, development, and peace-building organization active in 60 countries worldwide.
Lapp was a member of the Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster. He had begun volunteering with the aid group in 2006, when from a desk in Akron he helped coordinate disaster relief to the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Walker said.
