School Firebombing a Decade Ago Is Fading Memory for Victims

Ten years have passed since David and Doris Young invaded the Cokeville Elementary School, taking 150 students and teachers hostage with a homemade gasoline bomb and dreams of a bizarre new world.

But Meaghan Thompson remembers one thing clearly: At the time, her teacher was reading “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

“I hate that story,” she says now.

That, it seems, is the extent of the scars she bears. She was 7 on May 16, 1986, when the Youngs took over her school; now she is 17, a high school junior, and the horror of that day seems so far away.

The same goes for eight other kids sitting on a bench on the side of the Cokeville High School hallway. Oh, Jodi Dayton still has scars from the fire; another girl still needs skin grafts.

But more often than not, they laugh off the fading memories of the episode that happened when they were only 7 or 8. Only occasionally do they think about how close they came to annihilation.

“We were lucky,” says Jennie Buckley, 18. “I don’t know that we’re still meant to be here.”

Nobody knows why the Youngs did what they did.

David Young, a former marshal in Cokeville, left 40 diaries that outlined his obsession with mathematical proof that God did not exist; evidently, he dreamed of reincarnating himself, the children and a $300-million ransom in a “Brave New World” that could only be reached through death.

When the couple entered the school, they herded children and teachers into a 30-foot-square room. City and county authorities, tipped off by the Youngs’ daughter, quickly surrounded the building.

Young stacked handguns and rifles against a wall after entering the classroom and then began making demands by telephone: He wanted to speak to President Reagan. He wanted $2-million ransom for each hostage.

Some students weren’t alarmed until the day’s final bell sounded and they couldn’t leave.

“We were so young,” says Kevin Nate. “You know, my sister came up saying, ‘We’re being held hostage.’ I said, ‘What’s that mean?’ ”

“If we would have been older, it would have been a lot scarier,” Thompson adds. “When he said he can take us to a new world, the only thing I could imagine was Hawaii and thinking that’d be cool.”

No one was hurt until the Youngs’ bomb exploded, three hours after the incident began.

The bomb was made of three milk jugs filled with gasoline; only one detonated, and no one knows why the others did not. If the other two had exploded, half of this western Wyoming town’s kindergarten class and all students in first- through sixth grade almost certainly would have died.

There was “a big ball of red,” Dayton recalls.

“It was weird. It went suddenly quiet,” Thompson says.

“Does anybody remember how they got out?” Ryan Thornock asks. “The whole thing was a miracle.”

In fact, the explosion blew out the classroom window, and children scrambled through the hole to safety through heavy black smoke. All but four children escaped without major injuries; music teacher John Miller was shot in the shoulder as he fled.

Investigators later said the bomb apparently went off because Doris Young inadvertently took her hand off a dead man’s switch. She was badly burned in the explosion; her husband ended her misery with a bullet to the head.

Then, he walked into a children’s bathroom and killed himself.

Ten years later, carpet covers a classroom floor blackened by the blast and stained by Doris Young’s blood. Walls scarred by flame and smoke are now snow white, displaying a poster of a train that says, “I think I can.”

There are couches, computers and bookcases. “The younger people refer to it as the ‘reading room,’ but we all still refer to it as the ‘bomb room,’ ” says Rocky Moore, a fifth-grade teacher.

In the months after the incident, school district psychologist Nohl Sandall led a team of 11 counselors to promote healing.

“We left the door to the building open all summer long so that people could see they could rebuild their own lives the same as this school was being rebuilt,” says former Principal Max Excell.

In addition, Miller--the music teacher who was shot--went from classroom to classroom the week after the bombing to show his wound. Psychologists hoped students would overcome fears by seeing that Miller survived.

It wasn’t as easy as putting up a new coat of paint. Nate suffered from claustrophobia because of memories of the jammed room. Melanie Chadwick slept with her mom for about two months afterward. Thompson speaks of nightmares that still occasionally haunt her.

But by now, most kids have graduated from high school. Each received a $110 check from a bombing trust fund, and most say they have fully recovered.

“It was a really close-knit community in the first place, which is one of the things I think that helped them survive the trauma,” Excell says.

The adults also had to come to terms with what had happened.

Excell walked through the school one night. “I went into the bathroom that he killed himself [in]. I convinced myself that this guy’s dead,” he says.

Nearly the entire staff remains intact. Second-grade teacher Jean Mitchell, whose room the Youngs took over, teaches next door now. Her husband, Jack, teaches across the hall. Secretary Christine Cook continues to greet students as they come through the door, as she has for the last 16 years and as she did when Young made her his first hostage.

Moore, the fifth-grade teacher, has no trouble going into the bomb room, but he will not enter the bathroom where Young killed himself.

“A lot of times I look back at it and think it really didn’t happen to me, but then something happens,” he says. “Time heals all wounds. I wish it never happened. But it did. It’s nothing to dwell on. We’re back to normal.”