April 19th, 1995 fell on a Wednesday. On that day 26 years ago it was much like today in Oklahoma City. The sky was clear and so brilliantly blue it was if you could see all the way to God. The temperature, also like today, was mild enough for short sleeves. In other words it was shaping up to be a perfect spring day.
At around nine am however, all the perfection was shattered.
When the massive explosion ripped a huge chunk out of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building I was in Edmond, pulling out of a parking lot. I was driving a cab at the time while fielding a never ending stream of rejections for a novel I had written. The Yellow Cab dispatcher, who was located about 10 blocks north and one block west of the building, came on the radio. His exact words were, "What was that?" A split second later the sound of the blast rolled through. You felt it as much as heard it. The concussion set off car alarms throughout the parking lot. At that point I was about 11 miles north of downtown Oklahoma City.
I turned south onto what is still called the Broadway Extension. It's the highway which leads straight into downtown OKC from Edmond. A huge plume of smoke was rising over the skyline. My initial thought was that a plane had crashed in the middle the city.
For reasons I'm not sure of I drove south to the 23rd St exit. By then every time the dispatcher came on the air his voice was nearly drowned out by sirens, what sounded like dozens and dozens of sirens. The state capitol complex, just east of 23rd and Broadway, had just ordered an emergency evacuation of all its workers. At the end of the off ramp I ran into what can best be described as traffic gridlock.
The dispatcher said something about a gas line explosion. I wasn't convinced. Turning on the car's radio I found most of the rock and roll stations had hooked into TV feeds. The talking heads were babbling out of control. Confusion was rampant. No one knew what was going on, or what had actually happened. The word bomb would not be mentioned for another two, or so hours.
When it became obvious to everyone it was indeed a bomb rumors suddenly ran wild of a yet another device found in the remains of the Murrah building. A second panic ensued. Rescue workers were ordered off of the site, sometimes leaving survivors still half buried in the rubble. Local TV recorded scenes of people running through the streets like extras in a Godzilla movie. To this day no one knows who sounded the alert to a second bomb, which didn't exist.
Rescue squads returned later--some had refused to leave despite the threat of a second explosion--and continued to pull people from the building. That night a surgeon had to perform an emergency amputation of a woman's leg which was hopelessly trapped and mangled beneath a concrete slab.
In all 168 people were officially listed as dead, including 19 babies and toddlers in a second floor daycare center. The body count might be off since there was a spare leg found on the street which didn't match any of the other victims, but no one wanted to pursue the matter.
The beast who drove the Ryder rental truck loaded with 50 gallon drums packed with Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel, then parked it directly in front of the building, was arrested the afternoon of the explosion. He was fleeing north on I-35 and was stopped by a Highway Patrol Trooper. The arrest charges had nothing to do with the bombing. His getaway vehicle didn't have a license plate and he was carrying a concealed weapon. 26 years later, thanks to the Oklahoma legislature the second charge would have been moot, because its now legal in Oklahoma for anyone to conceal and carry a weapon without any sort of license, or training.
Tim McVeigh was arrested by the FBI the next morning mere minutes before he walked out of the Noble County jail on bail. His bondsman was quoted that day as saying, "That boy needs a lawyer worse than anyone I've ever seen."
McVeigh got one, but it didn't do him any good. He was executed in June 2001. Less than three months after his death radical Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center Towers and another into the Pentagon. A fourth would plow into a field in Pennsylvania. Timothy McVeigh's act of terrorism paled in comparison both in its scope and number of casualties. Since then, outside of Oklahoma City, most American don't even remember him, or the horror of that day.
The shock felt on the 19th turned into a profound sense of violation for most residents of OKC by the next morning. It soon morphed to anger, then a desperate hunger for revenge. McVeigh's accomplice, Terry Nichols escaped the needle and is spending life in federal prison. When he was sentenced Oklahoma City howled for his blood.
All this happened a generation ago. But, as we've seen the Tim McVeighs are still with us. In fact, some of them are currently sitting in Congress.
As the green lady once said, "What a world, what a world."
4-19-21
I was living in Houston and off work that day, My bride and I were at IHOP for breakfast when we heard about it on the radio driving home. I spent the remainder of the day around the TV set, was eerie watching OKC local news in Houston. While working for AT&T in OKC, worked down around that area fairly often, and worried all day about my many telephone company friends who worked downtown. One was severely traumatized, but physically unharmed. The surgeon who did the emergency amputation was one I had done phone work for several times, as I recall normally he worked sports medicine. My dad was living at Epworth Villa at the time, close to where you were, and he felt the blast in his apartment. He died less than a month later, I think the shock of this contributed to his death. A terrible time in OKC history, but have always been proud of my home folks who handled it with courage, dignity and grace.
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