‘I Could Not Write and Cry at the Same Time’

I arrived in Oklahoma City the day the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was blown apart. A bomb planted in a rental truck had detonated in front of the nine-story structure.

What immediately caught my eye was the glass. The building had this glass front, and the bomb sent shards and tiny splinters of glass all across the downtown area. Everywhere you walked, glass crunched under your shoes.

Other reporters wrote about the victims: 168 dead, including 19 children, many of them enrolled in the day-care center on the second floor. More than 500 were injured. It remains the worst act of terrorism in the United States.

I turned my attention to the truck and the bomb itself, and the massive federal investigation that followed--the largest in U.S. criminal history.

Within hours, the FBI had located the truck axle and that took them to a Ryder rental counter in Kansas. At a nearby motel they recovered a registration card with the truck driver’s name--Timothy McVeigh.

At that time he was sitting inside a small jail atop the courthouse in Perry, Okla. He had been arrested shortly after the bombing while driving a rusted-out Mercury Marquis without license plates and hiding under his jacket a .45-caliber Glock military assault pistol.

The world was introduced to McVeigh as the FBI escorted him back to Oklahoma. He was dressed in a bright orange jail jumpsuit, his eyes staring far, far away.

I busied myself learning more about who he was. A clean-cut kid from upstate New York. No early signs of inherent violence. An Army hero actually, a decorated tank gunner in the Persian Gulf War.

But McVeigh had washed out of the Army’s elite Special Forces. He came home disillusioned and angry, and one day abruptly left town. For the next several years he drifted, eventually into the arms of the extreme right.

Always a gun lover, he railed against any controls on the 2nd Amendment. He wrote letters warning that big government was taking away our liberties.

What really set him off was Waco--the FBI standoff in Texas that ended in flame and fire and the deaths of some 80 members of a small religious group.

McVeigh had been to Waco. He had seen the same tanks that he rode in the Gulf now being used in the FBI siege. The Branch Davidian complex went up in a fireball on April 19, 1993. The Murrah building came down on April 19, 1995. McVeigh planned it that way.

Finding out about him, covering his case was my concern--the stuff of legality and investigations. Others wrote about the victims’ pain. They are good people, Oklahomans. They vowed from the beginning that they will never forget. They are erecting a large memorial and museum on the spot where their building once stood. They don’t want the world to forget, either.

But I covered the two federal trials--for McVeigh and his partner, Terry Nichols, an itinerant farmhand who helped collect the bomb parts but did not ride shotgun with McVeigh to Oklahoma City.

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The trials were held out of state, in Denver. Two years had gone by. McVeigh was sentenced to death; he recently was moved to a new prison death house in Indiana. Nichols received life in prison with no parole. Now Oklahoma plans to try Nichols a second time in Oklahoma City to seek the death penalty.

Each day in the Denver courtroom, the testimony droned on. Neither McVeigh nor Nichols testified. Much of the evidence centered on the science of farm fertilizer and fuel oil, or the listing of feed store and storage locker receipts, motel registration cards and truck rental forms.

To keep the courtroom alert, prosecutors interspersed the dry testimony with the vivid and painful recollections of survivors. And it was there that I finally had to go beyond dry investigations and legalese and face the pain.

A young mother testified how she frantically searched for her infant son, one of the day-care children. She found him with other babies on a patio behind the building. All had died in the blast; rescue workers had placed their tiny bodies out on the patio.

“Please don’t lay our babies on the glass!” the young mother shrieked to them. “We don’t want our babies on the glass!”

A man stepped forward with a large broom and swept the glass away.

In the courtroom, prosecutors and FBI agents dabbed their eyes. Some jurors wept openly. The judge, who had lost a daughter in a hiking accident, turned away. I closed my notebook; I could not write and cry at the same time. I stared across the room, at McVeigh. His face was impassive as the young mother’s story continued.

All around the man with the broom, the building still shook and the smoke billowed and the mothers wailed. The man swept the glass this way and that, sweeping like it was the most important thing in all of the world to do. Right then, perhaps it was.