Murrah Building bombing 30th anniversary

Yesterday was also the 30th anniversary of the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the result of a terrorist attack that mimicked the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by using a panel rental truck as the container for an Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO) bomb which took out the front wall of the building and over a third of each floor. 168 people were killed in the blast. Here is an update of my blog entry from 2015, which itself was an update from a 2005 article, shortly after my wife and I had visited the memorial, when we were in town for the Oklahoma Republican Convention. I don't think I can improve upon what was written by those who were there. I've updated links where I could. I've left live links in place but have added archive links for safekeeping.

Much has been written by those who were in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Rather than try to improve on their work, or even try to meaningfully excerpt it, I'll send you their way. They are all must-reads.

Jan, the Happy Homemaker was picked up by a friend and they went to volunteer at University Hospital. She ended up carrying equipment to the triage site and was overwhelmed by what she saw there. (Archive link.)

Don Danz felt the explosion four blocks away, then went with a coworker to look for her dad, who worked in the Murrah Building. Don has a map showing damaged buildings as distant as a mile away.

Mike LaPrarie at Mike's Noise has a series of posts: His memories of the day of the bombing, a gallery of links, photos he took in the days and weeks following the bombing, profiles of the perpetrators, and unanswered questions -- what about John Doe No. 2, stories of multiple bombs and multiple explosions, and rumors of advance warning of an attack. (Archive links: Series intro, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.)

The late great Charles G. Hill linked to his reaction to media coverage on the first anniversary of the bombing (his very first weekly web column, Vent #1), and on the 10th anniversary his thoughts on what the perps intended to teach us, and what Oklahoma Citians learned instead about themselves.

In a separate entry, Charles links to several other first-person accounts:

Chase McInerney, who was on the scene as a working journalist. (Archive link.): "In many respects, the bombing was the defining moment in my life. For more than three years, it consumed me professionally, to the point of obsession, really. It impacted relationships, leading to friendships and the dissolution of others. It connected me to my native state in a way I wouldn't have thought possible. It drew me into situations and brought me to people who continue to haunt me. And there are moments from that day and the weeks and months that followed I will never forget."

See-Dubya, guest-posting at Patterico's Pontifications: "Oklahoma is a close-knit state; everyone knows someone who knows everyone else. I was incredibly lucky that I didn't lose any friends or family that day. A friend, a great philanthropist who worked tirelessly to improve the state's schools, was talking on the phone in the old Journal-Record building across the street. She was facing her plate glass window when the shock wave hit and the flying glass slashed her throat. She was bleeding to death, but her secretary found her and carried her down to the ambulances just in time. The last time I saw her she still spoke in a whisper, but she still spoke. The daughter of an old deer hunting buddy of mine was going down a staircase inside the Murrah building when the blast threw her down the stairs. According to the second-hand account I heard, she woke up, and walked out of the wreckage. Her officemates never did."

Robyn at Shutterblog: "For the first time, Todd and I visited the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial with his family over the weekend. We had both purposely put off seeing it for this long. We just hadn't been ready 'til now. I spent most of my time walking through the pathways quietly, letting my camera lens absorb the images in front of me. I think somehow deep-down, I needed that buffer zone. Seeing the tiny chairs of the littlest victims was almost more than my heart could bear." (Archive link.)

Frederick Ochsenhirt, A Bluegrass Blog: "I didn't have kids then, as our first was still four years away, but even then I understood that Oklahoma City was nightmare-inducing for those who did. The day care center was supposed to be a safe haven, a place of comfort during the time the kids had to be separated from the parents. Then on an April morning, it became a place of pain and suffering and death. Four and a half years later, when it was time for our little one to go to a day care center of his own, half a continent away in a place that seemed more secure, I still thought about Oklahoma City, but took comfort that I was in a different place, in a different time. Terrorists could never attack Washington, DC, right?"

Downtown Guy was there, too:

I was there on April 19th. No, thank God, I wasn't a victim, and I wasn't in the buildings when the blast went off. But I was out there soon after. Without risking letting out who I am, let's just say I was out there serving the public. I saw horrible things I never thought I'd see. I saw a person die. And with all the hype out there right now, the image is haunting me again.

I didn't know how much the bombing effected me until the second anniversary. A procession of victims marched through downtown. I watched. I started sweating. My head felt like it was about to explode. I rushed to an alley next to the old library. I threw up in the weeds.

I remember the initial reports, speculating about a natural gas main explosion, then the suggestion that this might be linked to foreign terrorism (remember, it was just two years since the first attack on the World Trade Center), rumors that some Middle Eastern man had been apprehended at the Oklahoma City airport. They found a part of the bomb truck, tracked the VIN back to a rental outlet in Junction City, Kansas, and before long we had sketches of two John Does. It wasn't much longer with John Doe No. 1 was apprehended near Perry, driving a car without a license plate.

I visited the site three weeks later, just after my second nephew was born a few miles away at Baptist Hospital. The building still stood there, agape, awaiting demolition. Teddy bears, flowers, photos, and other tokens of remembrance lined the chain link fence.

My wife and I visited the memorial in April 2005. I am not fond of the memorial. I don't think we know how to build memorials any more, and I wrote in 2005 that I didn't have high hopes for what would be built at Ground Zero in New York. It's too big, too grand, too sleek, too clean. But there were a few things about it, mainly small, simple, untidy things, that touch the heart:

• Among the Field of Chairs, 19 chairs aren't as big as the others.
• The Survivor Tree -- an elm that once stood in the middle of an asphalt parking lot across the street from the blast is now the focal point and the symbol of the memorial. It's the one spot of shade and shelter at the memorial.
• The graffito, spraypainted on the Journal Record building by a rescue worker: "Team 5 / 4-19-95 / We search for the truth. We seek Justice. The Courts Require it. The Victims Cry for it. And GOD Demands it"
• The fence -- in 2005 it was still there, still hung with memories of lives cut short, beautiful young women, bright-eyed kids, moms and dads. It must have driven the memorial's designer nuts to know that this garden-variety chain link fence and its jumble of sentimental trinkets would continue to stand next to the sleek and stark gates.

(The fence south of the gate and NW 5th Street was taken down between August 2017 and May 2018, according to Google Street View images. The fence north of the gate was still there as of June 2024.)

Two neighboring churches have built their own small memorials across the street. St. Joseph's Old Cathedral has a statue of Jesus, weeping, facing away from the building and toward a wall with 168 niches. A message from the Roman Catholic Bishop of Oklahoma, Eusebius Beltran, explaining the significance of the statue and the design of the memorial, is posted nearby. First Methodist Church built a small open-air chapel shortly after the bombing as a place for prayer and worship for those visiting the site. These two simple shrines far better capture the Spirit that drew rescue workers and volunteers from across the state and the nation to comfort the dying, tend the wounded, search for the lost, clear away the debris, and begin to put a city back together again.

MORE from the 20th anniversary:

Here is Charles G. Hill's reflection on the 20th anniversary of the bombing, in which he outlined the career of Alfred P. Murrah, the Federal Appeals Court judge for whom the building was named, recounted hearing the explosion from his office miles away, and mentioned that the GM of the Oklahoma City Thunder, Sam Presti, would send new team members to visit the memorial. Charles noted that in April 19, 1995, Presti was living in his hometown of Concord, Mass., where one of the first battles of the American Revolution had occurred 220 years earlier.

Carla Hinton, religion reporter for the Oklahoman, profiled Frank and Donna Sisson, caretakers for almost 20 years of the open-air Heartland Chapel at First Methodist.

Reporter Jayna Davis has written and updated a book on her investigation of the identity of "John Doe No. 2" and the possible connection to hostile regimes and factions in the Middle East: The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing. Here is a 2011 article by Davis about the declassified 2005 FBI interrogation of convicted bomber Terry Nichols:

During the interview, the convicted bomber unleashed a startling admission: John Doe 2 exists. The FBI report states, "Nichols advised that John Doe 2's name had not been mentioned during the (FBI) investigation, and therefore, he feared for his life and his family's well-being should it become public."

The late McCurtain County Gazette journalist J. D. Cash pursued the bombers' connections to the white-supremacist movement. Cash and his work were profiled by Darcy O'Brien in The New Yorker in 1997. On Cash's death in 2007, Mike McCarville wrote:

His writings about the Oklahoma City bombing first gained attention because they included interviews with an undercover IRS operative who maintained that she had warned the government of the plans of right-wing extremists to attack federal buildings in 1995. Cash went on to delve deeper and deeper into Tim McVeigh and others who had lived or visited Elohim City, the religious compound in eastern Oklahoma. Using the Freedom of Information Act, he was able to make a case that the FBI had McVeigh and other members of a gang of Midwest Bank robbers under investigation prior to the 1995 bombing of the Murrah building.

O'Brien's New Yorker story about Cash's investigation and a Kansas City Star story, both from March 1997, are here. (Archive link here.) Here is the Gazette's list of archived stories about the bombing, covering 2002-2006. Emporia State University journalism professor Max McCoy paid tribute to Cash after learning of his death.

Cash did not have a journalistic background. He came to reporting for one story, and one story only: the Oklahoma City bombing. He did it better than anybody else, he did it for a newspaper with a circulation so small that most journalists cited it with a chuckle, and he came closer to the truth than anybody else. Damn.

MORE: