‘I Tell Them Mama Will Be Home . . .’

OKLAHOMA CITY — The explosion that ripped apart the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building was an atrocity so perverse that it sundered this quiet city’s very soul.

On the morning after, the people of Oklahoma City were irrevocably divided into those who grieved, those who trembled in relief, those who waited in waning hope and those who will be haunted forever by the memory of having done what they could, knowing it was not enough.

As the hours lengthened into another day, it was worst, perhaps, for those who were left to wait and conjure with their dread.

One of them was Anthony Cooper, whose wife was the director of the America’s Kids Day Care Center, which was demolished when the car bomb went off just yards away. Their 2-year-old son also was among the children who were sitting down to breakfast at 9:04 a.m, when the blast occurred.

Cooper huddled on the street outside the crumpled office building, hoping for word of his family. “I haven’t seen my son. I haven’t seen my wife,” he said, as his eyes frantically studied each victim rolled from the federal building on a gurney.

“I don’t know,” he moaned.

He was not alone.

Ten blocks away, at the shelter set up in the meeting room at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, a slender young mother stared vacantly at the wall and clutched her missing daughter’s teddy bear to her chest. The 16-month-old baby had been inside the second-floor day-care center.

Another woman, unable to get any word of her missing child, had paced the same room anxiously through the night. At 3 a.m., she bolted out the door and, when last seen by Red Cross emergency workers, was aimlessly worrying her way along the city’s streets.

By Thursday evening, other people in the shelter, dazed after 24 sleepless hours, muttered personal bargains with God or sat motionless on cots, trying to prepare themselves for the anticipated bad news about missing relatives, who worked in the nine-story federal building.

Amid the bitterness, fear and misery that pulsed through this heartland city, there were the fortunate ones. But even they were far from unmarked.

“I moved to Oklahoma from Whittier after the Los Angeles riots, believing it was a safe haven,” said 45-year-old Dan Grimes, a film audio consultant who has a 13-month-old son. “Well, in a matter of minutes that belief became an illusion, and it’s ripping my heart out.”

Mickey Buseman, 38, a car sales manager recovering from cuts on his back caused by flying shards of glass, added, “I thought I had a better chance at winning the lottery than being involved in a terrorist attack here.”

Kirk Sloan, 30, numbers himself among the luckiest of all. He was driving his 5-year-old son, Jarred, to the day-care center when he heard the explosion.

By coincidence, Sloan had overslept Wednesday and was an hour late in dropping off the boy, who enrolled in the preschool only last week.

“I count myself as very fortunate that neither my son nor I was there on time,” said Sloan, a groundskeeper at the federal building. “Somebody up there was watching over us.”

Still, he could not muster the words to tell his son what had happened to his schoolmates and teachers, like Wanda Howell, 34, who had started working at the preschool just a few weeks ago and is among the missing.

Seated on a folding chair and hunched over a pillow at the St. Luke’s shelter, her husband, Melvin Howell, 34, said it hurt too much to watch television news broadcasts or read newspaper articles about the catastrophe.

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“Why now? Why here? Why that building?” he asked rhetorically in hushed tones. “I have two daughters and they can’t stop crying. I tell them Mama will be home, don’t worry. Mama’s coming home.”

Most of those waiting “are in a mental and physical state of shock and just sitting there because they don’t know what else to do,” said Donna Banks, a volunteer counseling the families at St. Luke’s shelter.

“Most have come to the realization that they are not going to get good news. But we tell them not to give up because there are guardian angels flying all over that place,” she said. “So, we hold their hand and give them hugs. We let them cry.

“And if they want to scream we take them outside so they can do that.”

The atmosphere in the shelter darkened Thursday evening, when rescue workers armed with motion detectors, powerful spotlights, cranes, crowbars and dog teams updated the list of the known dead and missing: 52 dead, 12 of them children. At least 20 children still were unaccounted for late Thursday.

Not far from St. Luke’s, Sandra Valdez waited for word of her uncle, Gerald Martinez. He had accompanied a friend to the Social Security Administration offices at the Murrah building Wednesday morning. No one has heard from him since the bombing; no one can tell his family if he is alive or dead.

“He has a 1-week-old baby who is sick,” said Valdez, holding up a color snapshot of a smiling man sitting in a recliner. “He has four other children and we need him at home.”

There were no answers for Valdez on Thursday at the First Christian Church, a mammoth structure that has been converted into the Family Assistance Center. It is the sad place where relatives now come to give information on the missing.

For Valdez and for scores of others--the woman from Tulsa looking for her parents and 4-year-old daughter, the young man hoping to find his father--there was probably no more ominous task than filling out the form provided at the church.

What was the person wearing when last seen? the form asks. Were there any rings or other jewelry that might be used for identification? Are fingerprints available? Dental records? X-rays?

Emergency response officials said it may take up to five days to locate and identify all of the bodies in the dangerously unstable building.

One of the people working to do that Thursday was rescue worker Steve Gullett, 33, who rested on a patch of grass after another search for signs of life in the rubble.

He had just come from the day-care center, which had been just 15 feet above what Gullett called “ground zero.”

“It was the absolute worst. I saw a nursery full of bloody toys,” said Gullett, who belongs to a private rescue team from Nixa, Mo., called the “Ozarkians.”

“I didn’t know there were children in there until I arrived last night,” he said, trying hard not to cry. “I have five kids of my own. I have a feeling I’m going to have a lot of bad dreams to wake up to in the years ahead.”

He was not alone. Garth Clark, an internal-medicine doctor from Sherman, Tex., also explored the day-care center Thursday. What he saw left him confused and angry.

“There are pieces of identifiable body parts and clumps of tissue that are hard to describe,” he said. “I also saw toys, three-wheel bikes and sand pails that were half-full and seemingly left in the middle of play.”

“I kept this for myself,” he added, holding up a small plastic bag decorated with brightly colored images of stars, smiling moons and babies nestled in Easter baskets.

“It will remind me to take better care of my children.”

One of the first rescuers to reach the nursery Wednesday was Lydia Winfrey. “You couldn’t even tell if they had been little boys or little girls,” she said.