‘I Tell Them Mama Will Be Home . . .’

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 had worked in what was 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.

Stewart Burchett, 33, an emergency room technician at Deaconess Hospital, helped tend the injured and pulled bodies from the rubble. “This will haunt me for the rest of my life,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about the children, the babies.”

Melody Baltz, a 39-year-old telephone company worker, was just about to leave her boss’s office a few blocks from the federal building when she heard a terrific bang and the plate-glass window in front of her exploded.

*

“I thought I had been shot,” she said Thursday from her bed at home. “I was bleeding so much, so much on my face, through my nose. Someone gave me a dish towel, and they held me up and walked me down eight flights of stairs.”

She was taken by ambulance to a hospital, treated and released, but she hasn’t been able to get out of bed since. It’s not so much the physical injuries--her face was cut by the flying glass and she was bruised by the ceiling tiles that fell on top of her. The damage is psychological, she said. “I dread the thought of ever going in that building again.

“It makes you feel like a different person. All I want to do is cry. My 4-year-old daughter says, ‘Mommy has a boo-boo.’ I can’t tell her it hurts inside so much more than that.”

Cabdriver Mark Tribble had driven past the federal building Wednesday morning and was about five blocks west when he heard a tremendous bang. He thought his car had exploded, then checked his arms and legs to see if he was all there. “It shook me up; it really makes you feel differently, like you’re not safe,” he said. Today, he debated whether to pick up fares in downtown Oklahoma City.

“I decided not to. Yesterday, I’m not ashamed to tell you, I took the day off I was so shook up. I cried driving home. When I got there, I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat on the couch and watched TV.”

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 on 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.

“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.”

*

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 Thursday at the First Christian Church here, 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 was 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 on 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.

Tim Gilbert, Oklahoma City’s deputy county assessor, was another of the volunteers who climbed through the federal building rubble looking for survivors.

“We were digging near the nursery,” he said. “God, I hope they get those little kids out. I had to leave little kids on the second floor. I’d rather have been horsewhipped than leave these little kids.”

Henderson Baker, whose office was on the building’s fourth floor, fell all the way to the first floor and survived with only cuts and bruises.

He went back into the building when a woman on the street cried that two of her children were still inside.

*

“I found one of her daughters later on,” he said. “She was dead. I picked her up and handed her to one of the policemen.”

The most dogged of the rescuers were the city’s firefighters. But their labors took more than a physical toll.

Fireman Mike Roberts dragged bodies out of the building all morning Thursday. As he emerged, he was asked how many more remained.

He gestured vaguely back toward the rubble. “They’re everywhere,” he said, wiping away tears.

One of his unit mates staggered out of the building and sat down to weep. All he’d been able to find on his last trip in was a tattered American flag and a baby’s severed finger.

Times staff writer Tim Rutten in Los Angeles contributed to this story.