Most Oklahoma Bomb Victims Will Be Shut Out of Trial

Hurt, angry and grieving, thousands of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing will soon get the trial they have long prayed for. But most of them probably will not be there.

With separate trials now ordered for the defendants, starting probably next year, the victims must decide whether they want to watch the trial as spectators or take the chance of being selected by prosecutors to testify against the defendants, Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols. Those who wish to be witnesses will be barred from watching any of the rest of the proceedings. Those who do not will have to sit silently as spectators, if they can get into the courtroom at all.

For the spectators, just to get to the building where the trials will be held means they will have to leave work and home and travel to Denver. Those who make the trip will have to compete for the 12 seats that will be set aside in the courtroom for the estimated 2,500 victims and their family members.

If they instead want to be in the audience for a special closed-circuit television transmission of the trial to Oklahoma City, they will have to participate in a public lottery or stand in long lines with hundreds of others. Even after that, they still will not have guaranteed seats.

In fact, even to qualify as victims, they have had to describe all over again for federal officials the pain they suffered when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed a year and a half ago.

Prosecutors must make equally difficult decisions about which of the vast pool of victims will get the opportunity to testify against the defendants. The large group is allowing prosecutors to take the voluntary approach to recruiting witnesses.

U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch, who has consistently ranked a fair trial for the defendants as more important than accommodating the victims, is keenly aware of the mounting frustrations for Oklahomans whose lives were forever marred by a 4,000-pound bomb on April 19, 1995.

“So much affects the lives of the people who have had their lives shattered by this,” he said from the bench earlier this month, describing his ruling--for the second time--to bar victims from watching the trial if they are going to testify.

His concern is that hearing the evidence and watching the defendants would unfairly darken the victims’ testimony against McVeigh and Nichols.

“We’re talking about emotions,” the judge said. “There are emotions from being in the courtroom, from everybody who is in the courtroom. So in my mind, there is simply no way to separate it. And that’s the responsibility I’m attempting to meet by what seems a very hardhearted rule.”

For many victims, it was just another in a series of letdowns in a case they have lived with since 168 people died and 850 were injured in the bombing at the downtown office building.

Many believe that they can best be healed psychologically not only by attending the trial but also by having the chance to stand up in court and tell the world--McVeigh and Nichols especially--what horrible pain they still suffer.

“I want to go with my mom,” said Dan Van Ess. “She definitely wants to go to the trial.”

His father, John Van Ess III, was a Housing and Urban Development employee on the building’s seventh floor. He was 67, just months away from retirement, when the bomb exploded.

For more than a week he remained missing. Three times his family was told he had been rescued, and they frantically searched for him at three hospitals. Finally, on the eighth day, his body was one of the last recovered from the Murrah building rubble.

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The Van Ess story is similar to countless tales of anguish that engulfed the people of Oklahoma City in the first days after the bombing. But as with the vast majority of the victims and their relatives, it is highly unlikely now that anyone in the Van Ess family will be present at the trial.

Dan Van Ess knows this because several times he and his relatives tried to get inside the courtroom here when McVeigh and Nichols were being arraigned.

“It was a madhouse,” he said of the throng of victims, reporters and ordinary citizens who descended on the federal courthouse next to where the Murrah building had stood. “You couldn’t get near it.

“I’d like to see McVeigh just once in person,” he said. “But you can’t even hope. They shoot everything down. Why won’t they change anything for the families?”

A study six months after the blast by the state’s two major universities and by the Gallup Organization found a community not only deep in grief but also at odds with how to relieve the suffering.

The people of Oklahoma City, the report said, “were significantly afflicted by helplessness, restlessness, avoidance and nightmares. They were also angrier, more stressed and reported drinking more.”

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Dean Gaines Kilpatrick, professor and director of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center at the Medical University of South Carolina, disagrees with Matsch’s belief that allowing victims to watch the trial would shade their testimony.

“It is difficult for me to see how permitting victims to view trial proceedings could meaningfully change victims’ perceptions that the bombing was a very bad thing,” she said in an analysis for the government. They would see or hear nothing at the trial that would raise the “negative emotions” they already feel toward the defendants, she said.

Mary P. Koss, a professor at the University of Arizona’s Health Sciences Center, suggested in a separate review for prosecutors that if victims could not freely choose to attend or avoid the trial, it could severely set back the healing process.

“Not all people cope the same way,” Koss said. “So there isn’t a single strategy that will reduce suffering across the board. It is best to let people sort out the basis of their self-knowledge about what would work best for them.”

For the federal prosecutors, it has been a struggle both to build their case and to provide a meaningful role for so many victims.

They lost in their effort to keep the trial in Oklahoma. They also could not persuade Matsch to allow victims both to watch the trial and to testify.

Prosecutors scored one victory: They got court approval for a closed-circuit television feed of the trials at one of the federal courtrooms here. But it was a group of victims that had successfully lobbied Congress for a new law providing for closed-circuit TV transmissions of federal trials that are moved out of town.

Prosecutors are now sorting through the victims and trying to decide who would make the best witnesses. It is not a painless process for them either, when each story is dramatic.

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“It’s tough all the way around,” said Leesa Brown, spokeswoman for the government’s team. “People want to be actively involved. But those things have to be balanced against how the judge is directing us to present the case.

“There are people who are going to be disappointed. Everybody knows that. But there are also people who are going to be very pleased and satisfied that we have done everything possible to represent them and their families in court and to seek justice and to present the truth. That’s our job.”

The government has tried to help victims, she said, by providing referrals to relief agencies, helping to arrange transportation and lodging in Denver and mailing updates on the case.

For the most part, victims seem to support the government’s efforts. But some have grown extreme in their belief that the government actually had some role in the bombing.

“We’ve heard some outrageous comments,” chief prosecutor Joseph Hartzler said recently.

In the weeks ahead, more critical decisions will have to be made in shaping the victims’ trial role.

Florence Rogers, the chief executive officer at the Murrah building’s credit union, lost 18 staff members in the explosion. She was speaking to eight of them in a meeting in her third-floor office when most of the floor gave way and they plunged to their deaths.

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“I still have other employees who are out with injuries who haven’t been able to come back to work,” she said. “I still have to see their families. So there isn’t a day in my life that I don’t have to deal with what happened.”

She said she has been tentatively notified that prosecutors want to use her as a witness during the start of the McVeigh trial. She said two of her staffers have been asked to testify during the sentencing phase if McVeigh is convicted.

She sometimes wonders: Why the three of them?

“I know what I saw right in front of me,” she said. “And the other two were under the rubble nearly all day that day. They didn’t know whether they were going to drown or bleed to death or have even more debris fall down on them.

“They have scars that will be with them to their graves.”