Remembering Terrance Yeakey, Murrah Building first responder

During the 30th anniversary observances of the Murrah Building bombing, Richard Booth, curator of the Libertarian Institute's library of material on the Oklahoma City bombing, described and linked to an interview from 1998 with Tonia Yeakey, the widow of Oklahoma City Police Officer Terry Yeakey. Yeakey rescued several people from the ruins of the Murrah Building. Mrs. Yeakey was interviewed by Tulsa radio talk show host Ken Rank, then at KAKC 1300, along with Col. Craig Roberts, a Marine and retired Tulsa Police officer who had been assigned to assist the FBI with the Murrah Building investigation. A key point in Booth's summary:

The clip here is Tonia Yeakey explaining how on the day of the OKC bombing, April 19th, 1995, she knew Terry worked downtown OKC in the morning and she had not heard from him by the afternoon so she was worried--his police car radio and computer weren't transmitting and nobody seemed to know where he was.

Then she finally got a call--Terry was at Presbyterian hospital--he had taken a fall and hurt himself--nothing broken, nothing major, so Tonia went on down to the hospital to get him. According to Tonia, Terry was adamant to her--as if to say "get me out of this hospital." She said she thought he had been threatened while he was there.

As he got into the car to leave the hospital, Terry told her "Tonia, it's not what they're saying it is. They're not telling the truth, they're lying about whats going on down there."

Officer Yeakey, one of the first officers in the Murrah Building on April 19, 1995, just minutes after the explosion, was murdered in 1996, just days before he was to be honored for his heroism in the rescue effort. His murder has never been solved. The clip also mentions Yeakey's 9-page report written shortly after the bombing and that his boss insisted on him writing a 1-page report to replace it. The 9-page version went missing. Yeakey had his wife accompany him back to the ruins of the Murrah Building some time before it was demolished, but law enforcement on the scene turned them away.

At this year's commemorations, Gov. Kevin Stitt honored Terrance Yeakey by name, apparently the first time this has ever happened at an official commemoration. Tonia Yeakey says that she wrote the governor after an article about her husband appeared on CNN.com, but she had not expected this.

Richard Booth's X account @okc_facts and his OKCfacts Substack are worth following. In an entry from last December, he provides a collection of links to articles about the OKC bombing by reporters J. D. Cash and Roger Charles, published in Soldier of Fortune and the McCurtain Daily Gazette.