Suspect’s Journey: Quiet Youth to Angry Adult : Profile: People who have known McVeigh offer varying views. His hatred of government grew while in Army.

In his senior portrait as a member of the Starpoint High Class of 1986, Timothy J. McVeigh wore a happy face, shaggy haircut and wide, toothy smile.

Now, as the image of the man charged with joining in the worst terrorist attack in American history is beamed across the nation, he is showing another face to the world.

Based on interviews over the past two days with people who have known McVeigh, a hazy portrait of a troubled young man is emerging. While much remains in the shadows, what is clear is that sometime during a stint in the U.S. Army, McVeigh changed. The quiet, friendly honor student who organized casino games for neighborhood kids grew into a young adult with a hatred for the government, and a fondness for guns and explosives.

Look at the images.

“He looks a lot tougher in the pictures on television,” said Wendy Stephany, a Buffalo social worker who was a high school classmate of McVeigh’s. “In high school, he was kind of thin . . . and didn’t have a buzz cut. He looks a lot different now. Back in high school, he looked like a regular, average guy.

“I was thinking,” Stephany continued. “What happened to him between then and now? It must have been a lot.”

“He was a good student and didn’t stand out in a crowd,” said Doug Gorman, a classmate at Starpoint who participated on the track team and honor society with McVeigh.

“I am completely surprised by all this in the news about him,” Gorman said.

McVeigh, who turns 27 today, is a man who has bounced around the globe--from his birthplace in the rural outreaches of Buffalo, N.Y., to the Gulf War battlefields, a U.S. Army base in Kansas, farms in Michigan and a mobile home park in Arizona. Then, finally, to his sojourn through Oklahoma in the days before Wednesday’s fatal bombing outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

Along the way, sources said, he began hanging around with political groups that harbored grudges against the government. During his military duty, McVeigh met Terry Nichols, a fellow serviceman who by several accounts shared a growing distrust of federal authority.

McVeigh’s military records are shuttered as the FBI investigates his past. Officials have said he was based at Ft. Riley in Kansas and participated in the Gulf War as a Bradley vehicle gunner.

“He was a good soldier,” James Ives, a fellow sergeant in his infantry unit, told the Associated Press. “If he was given a mission and a target, it’s gone.”

McVeigh left the Army about three years ago with sergeant stripes and an honorable discharge. Sources said he also took with him an intense friendship with Nichols, an increasing resentment of the government and an affection for the weapons of war.

McVeigh listed James Nichols, Terry Nichols’ older brother, as his next of kin on paperwork when he was jailed; neighbors and friends say that Terry Nichols and McVeigh told some people they were cousins and that McVeigh never spoke of his own family back in Pendleton.

Back home, McVeigh’s father, William, is described by Marge Brauer, whose family owns Fred’s Pizza at the one stoplight in the tiny town, as someone “everybody knows and loves. Bill is a helluva nice guy. He’s just a hard-working guy, involved in church, in bowling. I imagine he’s going through hell right now.”

Perhaps a clue to the dilemma faced by William McVeigh is the scene outside his home late Saturday. As the sun set, the front yard of the small, pale-yellow ranch house displayed an American flag on a pole flying at half-staff--a tribute to the deaths in Oklahoma City.

According to residents of Herington, Kan., McVeigh and Terry Nichols were like family. They visited mini-marts together, buying gas, cigarettes and snacks. They also were frequent patrons of local bars.

Most recently, townsfolk say, they occupied a corner table at the Silverado bar and grill in Herington last Sunday night--throwing darts, playing pool and drinking beer.

Sometime about 1993, McVeigh moved to Decker, Mich., to a farm owned by James Nichols.

Dan Stomber, a 35-year-old farmer who owns the “Mid-Michigan Rooster Ranch” just east of the Nichols place, describes McVeigh as entertaining. “If you spent an hour riding with him in a pickup, he’d keep you company and the ride would be short,” he said Saturday.

Stomber noticed that McVeigh was never without a gun, which he described as a black, semiautomatic that he jammed into the back of his pants.

Over a period of several months in late 1993 or early 1994, Stomber recalled, McVeigh and James Nichols liked to set off homemade bombs on the farm. He said that the explosives were made up of common farm products--fertilizer, chemicals and plastic bottles--similar to what authorities say was used in the Oklahoma City tragedy.

Another neighbor, Carl Broecker, a 40-year-old farmer who lives within a few miles of the Nichols farm, said he noticed that McVeigh would grow agitated whenever police cars cruised by the farm. “He was upset, nervous, always looking over his shoulder,” Broecker recalled.

From February to June of 1994, McVeigh reportedly rented a small trailer from Bob Ragin, owner of Canyon West Mobile and RV Park in Kingman, Ariz.

“He was just a problem,” Ragin recalled, adding that McVeigh “had a chip on his shoulder. . . . He didn’t think rules applied to him.”

For example, Ragin said, McVeigh brought a large brown dog into the trailer park despite a no-pets rule. When told to get rid of the animal, Ragin said, McVeigh “got mad and said: ‘I pay the rent.’ ” Ragin also said that McVeigh liked to go practice shooting out in a field nearby.

Fred Burkett, a former co-worker of McVeigh’s at State Security, a private security firm in Kingman, said that once when he and McVeigh were finishing up shooting practice, McVeigh just started “blowing ammunition”--shooting 150 to 200 rounds into fence posts. “He just kind of went wild,” Burkett said.

On Friday McVeigh, using his real name, checked into the Dreamland Motel, a modest inn fronting Interstate 70 on the south edge of Junction City, Kan.

Lea McGown, the 47-year-old owner and innkeeper, described McVeigh as a clean-cut young man who smiled easily and talked a lot as he checked into Room 25 on Good Friday. She said he arrived driving a “big clunker, yellow Mercury Marquis with a spot on the back.”

Had McGown been her usually considerate self, McVeigh might not have been caught.

She had noticed that McVeigh’s Arizona license plate was hanging sideways toward the passenger side. “I thought it was going to fall off,” she said. “Normally, I’d talk to my clients about such a thing, but I had too much to do that day” and forgot to mention it to McVeigh, who checked out of the inn early Tuesday morning.

The next day, shortly after 9 a.m., a truck packed with fertilizer, fuel oil and detonator exploded outside the nine-story federal building in Oklahoma City. About 75 minutes later, Trooper Charlie Hanger spotted a yellow, 1977 Mercury cruising along a highway about 60 miles north of the blast site.

The car, driven by McVeigh, had no license plate. It apparently had fallen off. After stopping the car for the routine violation, Hanger noticed that the driver had a concealed weapon--a loaded Glock 9-mm pistol--and arrested McVeigh without incident.

Two days later, federal authorities linked McVeigh to a rental lease for a Ryder truck believed to have been used in the bombing. He was arrested at the jail and charged with “malicious damaging and destroying by means of an explosive a building or real property, whole or in part, possessed or used in the United States.”

Fulwood, a Times staff writer, reported from Washington, D.C., and Steigerwald, a Times correspondent reported from Pendleton. Times staff writers Richard A. Serrano in Oklahoma City, Louis Sahagun in Herington, Kan., Judy Pasternak and Glenn F. Bunting in Decker, Mich., and Tina Daunt in Kingman, Ariz., contributed to this story.