A Survivor’s Tale: They All Vanished

There was only air where Don Burns sat, only air where Lanny Scroggins’ desk had been, an expanse of dusty, gray air that once held a bustling office of federal housing workers. All gone, V.Z. Lawton saw as he rose, blinking, from his toppled desk, all gone.

Lawton stood eight feet from the jagged semicircle carved out of the eighth-floor of Oklahoma City’s bomb-battered federal building, eight feet from the air that could have taken his place. He had not heard the sound of the initial blast. And now, in the immediate moments afterward, there was only silence.

“I didn’t hear a thing, nothing,” he said later. “It was like a tomb in there.”

Location meant everything when the north side of the federal building sheared away like a glacial rift. Where you sat, where you paused for even the briefest moment determined who walked away and who was carried out. It was an infernal sort of lottery, and there were few winners Wednesday in Oklahoma City, few as lucky as V.Z. Lawton, who walked out on his own, vexed only by a glass-riddled right eye and slashes on his arms and neck.

In the moments before the blast, Lawton had thought about heading over to the coffee machine to refill his Route 66 mug as he sat at his desk. He needed a refill to get through the morning. But he had papers to sign, papers that would save him.

And then, in a deadly second, the coffee machine, and all around it, vanished.

“If I was eight feet closer, they’d be spreading my ashes over Lincoln Park Golf Course,” he said later.

Lawton, 64, a management specialist for the federal Housing and Urban Development Department’s Indian Programs Division, had come in early, around 7 a.m., as he usually does, after a round of aerobics and iron-pumping at the YMCA across the street from his office. Freshly showered and shaved, the tall, raw-boned Lawton sat down to a sheath of documents that would last for most of the morning.

The federal building was filling up. Firearms agents were already in their offices a floor above. Lawton had recognized a few of them on the way in. There were narcotics agents and Secret Service men on the same floor, people Lawton knew only as faces.

On floors 7 and 8 were the HUD workers, people whose names and lives were familiar to Lawton. They were people like Don Gray and Lanny Scroggins. Men, like Lawton, who monitored the construction of new housing on Indian reservations. As he settled into his paperwork, Lawton could not see his co-workers--his view was obstructed by a tower of metal file cabinets.

But he knew they were there. They had greeted each other on the way in. “We just said our hellos, nothing fancy,” Lawton said later. “God, I hope to hell they were somewhere else.”

At his desk, hunched over documents, Lawton lost track of those around him. There was only one interruption before 9 a.m.--a request by Ruth Headly, a HUD worker in the next cubicle, that he sign as a witness on some insurance papers she needed to submit.

Lawton obliged, and was about to scribble his name when the building shook.

He recalls no explosion, only a jarring rain of debris from the floor above. Ceiling tiles, chunks of fiberglass and wood, twisted fragments of heating ducts and reams of paper hailed down over him, driving him to the floor. He tried to wedge under his desk, but the debris kept falling.

“It was just trash coming down, a waterfall of trash, like if a garbage truck had just unloaded on you,” he recalled.

Finally, when it ebbed, he rose, steadying himself. He tried to focus on the room around him, but vision was difficult. Smoke was pouring in from outside, billowing from burning cars, and dust sifted around him from the shattered contents of the shaken offices. Slowly, the eerie silence that first greeted him became filled with layers of noise--the sounds of sirens and alarms, the creaking of rubble and what seemed like the pop of bullets, a staccato that he later surmised was the crackle of live wires.

Finally, he heard a voice.

“Help, I can’t see!” It was Ruth Headly, calling from the next cubicle. “Is there anyone out there?”

Lawton crawled over the remains of his desk, away from the shards of family photographs and the broken marble trophy he had won in a racquetball match. The consummate bureaucrat, he remembered to take his briefcase, crammed with documents and bloody handprints.

A few feet away, Lawton found Headly splayed out next to her desk, her face awash in blood and dirt. “Don’t leave me,” she cried. Lawton held her: “Don’t worry.”

He helped her to her feet and called out to see if there was anyone else left. More silence. All he saw as he scanned the floor was wreckage, broken desks, broken partitions, broken chairs. He heard nothing from his co-workers. To the north, there was only air.

Finally, he had an answer. Ken Altizer, another HUD worker, called from the dark, near where Lawton remembered the stairwell must be. He braced Headly against him and walked her toward the voice. Smoke was still wafting in, but a stiff wind at times cleared it out of the area. Lawton finally found Altizer and the two of them propped Headly up as they entered the stairwell.

It was dark there too, but Lawton had a pocket flashlight. They descended slowly, following his shaft of light until they found a door. No one else was in the stairwell with them, Lawton realized as he found the last floor. He wondered if they were the only survivors.

There were others, among them Carole Lawton, V.Z.’s ex-wife, who also worked for HUD on the floor below. Carole Lawton, 62, a secretary, said she was sitting at her desk on the seventh floor when “all of a sudden the windows blew in. It got real dark and the ceiling just started coming down.”

She heard “the roar of the whole building crumbling.” Yet she somehow managed to find her way down the stairwell. Outside, huddled under a gray paramedic’s blanket, she saw V.Z. Lawton and the two embraced, old marital wounds forgotten for a moment.

Cleaned and sutured at St. Anthony Hospital, V.Z. Lawton arrived at his home six hours after his ordeal began. His right eye was hidden under a gauzy dome of bandages. A tie-dye pattern, etched in blood, splattered the front and collar of his white Tony Armour shirt. His wife, Betty, greeted him at the door with a silent embrace and then handed him a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Weary, still smarting from the ground glass shards left on his face and neck, Lawton slumped in a living room chair and took calls. Word had gotten around that he was a survivor, and the relatives of missing co-workers were calling, desperate to know if Lawton had seen them alive.

“Sorry, I just didn’t see her,” he told Mary Rentie’s grandmother.

“Jeez, I hope he made it,” he told his wife when another caller asked about John Van Ness.

By dusk, there was still no word on Don Burns or Lanny Scroggins. Nursing his beer, V.Z. Lawton wondered if they were somewhere else when their cubicles gave way to the air. He hoped they were.