Prosecutors Put Jury Inside Oklahoma City’s Horror

The horror of April 19, 1995, came back Friday--the roar of the bomb, the shouts of the injured, the flying glass, the falling floor, the sucking whoosh of the wind and the sudden blue sky as walls and windows of a building disappear.

And the agony of families searching for missing children.

Government prosecutors, in a state-of-the-art presentation, provided jurors hearing the trial of Timothy J. McVeigh with a floor-by-floor reenactment of the bomb blast that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

They played an audiotape that, by chance, captured the deafening boom at 9:02 a.m. that Wednesday morning.

They played a five-minute video montage of news clips that caught the smoke, the ankle-high broken glass and the federal employees who one minute were secretaries and clerks and office managers and the next were victims lying bleeding on the sidewalks.

Using high-tech graphics, they aired a three-dimensional computer mock-up of the nine-story building, and were able to show the jury of seven men and five women each floor, each agency, nearly every employee and visitor as the bomb struck at one of the busiest hours of the workday.

The effect was to pick up this Colorado jury and transplant it to downtown Oklahoma City--the scene of the worst terrorist attack in America.

Attorneys for McVeigh rarely rose to cross-examine the day’s witnesses--many of them Murrah building employees who survived to tell what had happened to their colleagues. There also were few objections from the defense. McVeigh himself sat quietly throughout the day, seemingly unmoved.

But in the spectator rows, many of the survivors and relatives of the dead covered their eyes and cried softly. Two female prosecutors cried openly. In the jury box, a young man, the one sitting closest to the witness stand, was seen wiping away a tear.

One by one the witnesses took the stand. This is what they said:

* Helena Garrett, working at a nearby building, heard the blast and then rushed to the Murrah site, desperate to find her 16-month-old son, Tevin. But she could not get inside, even after trying to climb over a pile of rubble and glass higher than her head to search for the children inside the Murrah day-care center.

So she wound up at the back of the building, where rescue workers were running outside with the broken bodies of other babies. The children were set down on the glass-covered pavement, with white sheets around them.

“I yelled, ‘Please don’t lay the babies down on the glass,’ ” she recalled. “But I didn’t know then they were already dead.”

Tevin too had died--but it was another three days before she was notified that officials had found and identified his body.

* Michael B. Norfleet was a Marine Corps pilot before the bombing. Like McVeigh, he was a decorated veteran of the Persian Gulf War. And on that morning in Oklahoma City, he parked his 1992 Ford Ranger next to a bright yellow Ryder rental truck in front of the Murrah building and walked inside.

On the sixth floor, he visited fellow Marines at the recruiting station. “Just about the time I got ‘hello’ and ‘good morning’ out of my mouth, the bomb hit,” he said. Someone yelled, “ . . . That’s a gas explosion,” and then all of the Marines were knocked to the ground. Norfleet’s right eye burst, his face cracked, his wrist broke and his skull fractured. When he came to, he said, “I could feel the life ebbing out of my veins. I knew if I stayed in the building I would die.”

He was carried down the back stairs, bleeding on each platform, bleeding on the street, bleeding in the ambulance carrying him to St. Anthony’s Hospital. By the time they had him on the operating table, he said, he had already lost nearly 50% of his blood.

He would never see again with that right eye. And like so many of the survivors, life would never be the same.

“Being blind in one eye, I’m not eligible for flying or for the Marine Corps,” he said. “The Marine Corps discharged me with 50% disability.”

*

Under cross-examination, he was asked a single question by defense attorney Cheryl A. Ramsey. Did he see McVeigh in that Ryder truck? “No, I did not,” he said.

* Richard E. Williams, an official with the General Services Administration, had long been a maintenance superintendent at the Murrah building. He knew every hallway, every corner, every cranny in the high-rise.

When the bomb exploded, he was in his first-floor office.

“I was standing there talking in my office, and that’s the last thing I remembered,” he said. “The next thing I remember, I came to, lying in a fetal position, sort of on my left side.

“I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t hear anything.”

His injuries too were extensive--broken bones, deep cuts, more than 150 stitches required to close his face.

Christopher L. Tritico, another McVeigh defense attorney, had only a few questions, and only one of any real substance. He got Williams to acknowledge that there were 80 blue plastic trash cans throughout the building. Tritico was apparently referring to the government’s allegation that McVeigh used blue barrels to build the bomb.

* Police Sgt. John Avera was one of the first rescue workers inside the blown-out building.

Rushing to the structure, he found a man writhing in the middle of the street, glass chunks all around him. “I realized he was hurt worse than anything I could do for him,” Avera said.

He crawled into the building, where he helped recover two children--a boy, P.J. Allen, who lived, and a girl, Baylee Allmon, who died. He also spotted a woman trapped inside, with tons of concrete and debris all around her. All he could see was her leg, sticking out of the rubble. He could not get her out. So to calm her, he struck up a conversation.

“We discussed her husband and her two children,” he said. “I asked her what she had for breakfast that morning.”

He found a piece of paper and pencil and wrote down her name. He promised to contact her family. But later, moving on to help others, he lost the little note. He remembers her name was Terry. He does not know if she lived.