It’s hard to believe that it’s been 26 years since the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City or OKC, as most locals know it. Today is the day after my niece Jessie’s birthday, so the joy and celebration of a family birthday and the devastation of the first act of domestic terrorism in the U.S. will be forever entwined in my mind. Plus my niece actually lives in Yukon, a suburb of OKC. I grew up in Stillwater, Oklahoma, so I have a real ache in my heart for this tragedy. It’s the Midwest, the place where ordinary people live, work and play. It’s the heartland — the pulsing beat of America. How could a calamity of such epic proportions happen here? Shortly after the bombing, I drove through OKC on my way to Stillwater and stopped at the temporary memorial. The fence full of heartfelt messages to loved ones, along with personal mementos, brought tears to my eyes. Decent, honest, hard-working people died here. And for what? Let’s find out.
According to Wikipedia, the Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, on Wednesday, April 19, 1995. Perpetrated by anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing happened at 9:02 am and killed at least 168 people, injured more than 680 others and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings within a 16-block radius, shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings and destroyed or burned 86 cars, causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage. Local, state, federal and worldwide agencies engaged in extensive rescue efforts in the wake of the bombing. The Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA activated 11 of its Urban Search and Rescue Task Forces, consisting of 665 rescue workers who assisted in rescue and recovery operations. Until the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States other than the Tulsa race massacre. It remains one of the deadliest acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
Within 90 minutes of the explosion, McVeigh was stopped by Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Charlie Hanger for driving without a license plate and arrested for illegal weapons possession. Forensic evidence quickly linked McVeigh and Nichols to the attack; Nichols was arrested, and within days, both were charged. Michael and Lori Fortier were later identified as accomplices. McVeigh, a veteran of the Gulf War and a sympathizer with the U.S. militia movement, had detonated a Ryder rental truck full of explosives he parked in front of the building. Nichols had assisted with the bomb's preparation. Motivated by his dislike for the U.S. federal government and unhappy about its handling of the Ruby Ridge incident in 1992 and the Waco siege in 1993, McVeigh timed his attack to coincide with the second anniversary of the fire that ended the siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
The official FBI investigation, known as "OKBOMB," involved 28,000 interviews, 3.5 short tons of evidence and nearly one billion pieces of information. The bombers were tried and convicted in 1997. Sentenced to death, McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, at the U.S. federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison in 2004. Michael and Lori Fortier testified against McVeigh and Nichols; Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison for failing to warn the United States government, and Lori received immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony.
In response to the bombing, the U.S. Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which tightened the standards for habeas corpus in the United States. It also passed legislation to increase the protection around federal buildings to deter future terrorist attacks.
On April 19, 2000, the Oklahoma City National Memorial was dedicated on the site of the Murrah Federal Building, commemorating the victims of the bombing. Remembrance services are held every year on April 19, at the time of the explosion.
Motive
The chief conspirators, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, met in 1988 at Fort Benning during basic training for the U.S. Army. McVeigh met Michael Fortier as his Army roommate. The three shared interests in survivalism. McVeigh and Nichols were radicalized by white supremacist and antigovernment propaganda. They expressed anger at the federal government's handling of the 1992 Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI standoff with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, as well as the Waco siege, a 1993 51-day standoff between the FBI and Branch Davidian members that began with a botched Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms or ATF attempt to execute a search warrant. There was a firefight and ultimately a siege of the compound, resulting in the burning and shooting deaths of David Koresh and 75 others. In March 1993, McVeigh visited the Waco site during the standoff, and again after the siege ended. He later decided to bomb a federal building as a response to the raids and to protest what he believed to be U.S. government efforts to restrict rights of private citizens, in particular those under the Second Amendment. McVeigh believed that federal agents were acting like soldiers, thus making an attack on a federal building an attack on their command centers.
Target selection
McVeigh later said that, instead of attacking a building, he had contemplated assassinating Attorney General Janet Reno; FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, who had become infamous among extremists because of his participation in the Ruby Ridge and Waco sieges; and others. McVeigh claimed he sometimes regretted not carrying out an assassination campaign. He initially intended to destroy only a federal building, but he later decided that his message would be more powerful if many people were killed in the bombing. McVeigh's criterion for attack sites was that the target should house at least two of three federal law enforcement agencies: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA. He regarded the presence of additional law enforcement agencies, such as the Secret Service or the U.S. Marshals Service as a bonus.
A resident of Kingman, Arizona, McVeigh considered targets in Missouri, Arizona, Texas and Arkansas. He said in his authorized biography that he wanted to minimize non-governmental casualties, so he ruled out Simmons Tower, a 40-story building in Little Rock, Arkansas, because a florist's shop occupied space on the ground floor. In December 1994, McVeigh and Fortier visited Oklahoma City to inspect McVeigh's target: the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
The Murrah building had been targeted in October 1983 by whit supremacist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, including founders James Ellison and Richard Snell. The group had plotted to park "a van or trailer in front of the Federal Building and blow it up with rockets detonated by a timer." After Snell's appeal for murdering two people in unrelated cases was denied, it happened that he was executed the same day as the Murrah bombing.
The nine-story building, built in 1977, was named for a federal judge and housed 14 federal agencies, including the DEA, ATF, Social Security Administration and recruiting offices for the Army and Marine Corps.
McVeigh chose the Murrah building because he expected its glass front to shatter under the impact of the blast. He also believed that its adjacent large, open parking lot across the street might absorb and dissipate some of the force and protect the occupants of nearby non-federal buildings. In addition, McVeigh believed that the open space around the building would provide better photo opportunities for propaganda purposes. He planned the attack for April 19, 1995, to coincide with the second anniversary of the Waco siege and the 220th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution.
Gathering materials
McVeigh and Nichols purchased or stole the materials they needed to manufacture the bomb and stored them in rented sheds. In August 1994, McVeigh obtained nine Kinestiks from gun collector Roger E. Moore and ignited the devices with Nichols outside Nichols's home in Herington, Kansas. On September 30, 1994, Nichols bought forty 50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from Mid-Kansas Coop in McPherson, Kansas, enough to fertilize 12.5 acres of farmland at a rate of 160 pounds of nitrogen per acre, an amount commonly used for corn. Nichols bought an additional 50-pound bag on October 18, 1994. McVeigh approached Fortier and asked him to assist with the bombing project, but he refused.
McVeigh and Nichols robbed Moore in his home of $60,000 worth of guns, gold, silver and jewels, transporting the property in the victim's van. McVeigh wrote Moore a letter in which he claimed that government agents had committed the robbery. Items stolen from Moore were later found in Nichols's home and in a storage shed he had rented.
In October 1994, McVeigh showed Michael and Lori Fortier a diagram he had drawn of the bomb he wanted to build. McVeigh planned to construct a bomb containing more than 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with about 1,200 pounds of liquid nitromethane and 350 pounds (160 kg) of Tovex, a water-gel explosive composed of ammonium nitrat and methylammonium nitrate that has several advantages over traditional dynamite, including lower toxicity and safer manufacture, transport and storage. Including the weight of the sixteen 55-U.S. gallon drums in which the explosive mixture was to be packed, the bomb would have a combined weight of about 7,000 pounds. McVeigh originally intended to use hydrazine rocket fuel, but it proved too expensive. During the Chief Auto Parts Nationals, a round of the National Hot Rod Association Winston Drag Racing Series at the Texas Motorplex, McVeigh posed as a motorcycle racer and attempted to purchase 55-gallon drums of nitromethane on the pretext that he and some fellow bikers needed the fuel for racing. But there were no nitromethane-powered motorcycles at the meeting, and he did not have an NHRA competitors' license. Representative Steve LeSueur refused to sell to him because he was suspicious of McVeigh's actions and attitudes, but sales representative Tim Chambers sold him three barrels. Chambers questioned the purchase of three barrels, when typically only 1–5 gallons of nitromethane, he noted, would be purchased by a Top Fuel Harley rider, and the class was not even raced that weekend.
McVeigh rented a storage space in which he stockpiled seven crates of 18-inch-long Tovex "sausages," 80 spools of shock tube — small-diameter hollow plastic tubing used to transport an initiating signal to an explosive by means of a shock wave, also known as a percussive wave, traveling the length of the tube and 500 electric blasting caps, which he and Nichols had stolen from a Martin Marietta Aggregates quarry in Marion, Kansas. He decided not to steal any of the 40,000 pounds of ANFO — ammonium nitrate/fuel oil — he found at the scene, as he did not believe it powerful enough; he did obtain 17 bags of ANFO from another source for use in the bomb. McVeigh made a prototype bomb that was detonated in the desert to avoid detection.
Later, speaking about the military mindset with which he went about the preparations, he said, "You learn how to handle killing in the military. I face the consequences, but you learn to accept it." He compared his actions to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rather than the attack on Pearl Harbor, reasoning it was necessary to prevent more lives from being lost.
On April 14, 1995, McVeigh paid for a motel room at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City, Kansas. The next day he rented a 1993 Ford F-700 truck from Ryder under the name Robert D. Kling, an alias he adopted because he knew an Army soldier named Kling with whom he shared physical characteristics, and because it reminded him of the Klingon warriors of “Star Trek.” On April 16, 1995, he and Nichols drove to Oklahoma City, where he parked a getaway car, a yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis, several blocks from the Murrah Federal Building. The nearby Regency Towers Apartments' lobby security camera recorded images of Nichols's blue 1984 GMC pickup truck on April 16. After removing the car's license plate, he left a note covering the vehicle identification number or VIN plate that read, "Not abandoned. Please do not tow. Will move by April 23. (Needs battery & cable)." Both men then returned to Kansas.
Building the bomb
On April 17–18, 1995, McVeigh and Nichols removed the bomb supplies from their storage unit in Herington, Kansas, where Nichols lived, and loaded them into the Ryder rental truck. They then drove to Geary Lake State Park, where they nailed boards onto the floor of the truck to hold the 13 barrels in place and mixed the chemicals using plastic buckets and a bathroom scale. Each filled barrel weighed nearly 500 pounds. McVeigh added more explosives to the driver's side of the cargo bay, which he could ignite — killing himself in the process — at close range with his Glock 21 pistol in case the primary fuses failed. During McVeigh's trial, Lori Fortier, the wife of Michael Fortier, stated that McVeigh claimed to have arranged the barrels in order to form a shaped charge. The illustration shows a shaped charge with 1: Aerodynamic cover, 2: Air-filled cavity, 3: Conical liner, 4: Detonator, 5: Explosive, and 6: Piezo-electric trigger. This shaped charge was achieved by tamping the aluminum side panel of the truck with bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to direct the blast laterally towards the building. Specifically, McVeigh arranged the barrels in the shape of a backwards J; he later said that for pure destructive power, he would have put the barrels on the side of the cargo bay closest to the Murrah Building; however, such an unevenly distributed 7,000-pound load might have broken an axle, flipped the truck over or at least caused it to lean to one side, which could have drawn attention. All or most of the barrels of ANNM contained metal cylinders of acetylene intended to increase the fireball and the brisance — shattering capability of a high explosive, determined mainly by its detonation pressure — of the explosion.
McVeigh then added a dual-fuse ignition system accessible from the truck's front cab. He drilled two holes in the cab of the truck under the seat, while two holes were also drilled in the body of the truck. One green cannon fuse was run through each hole into the cab. These time-delayed fuses led from the cab through plastic fish-tank tubing conduit to two sets of non-electric blasting caps which would ignite around 350 pounds of the high-grade explosives that McVeigh stole from a rock quarry. The tubing was painted yellow to blend in with the truck's livery and duct-taped in place to the wall to make it harder to disable by yanking from the outside. The fuses were set up to initiate, through shock tubes, the 350 pounds of Tovex Blastrite Gel sausages, which would in turn set off the configuration of barrels. Of the 13 filled barrels, nine contained ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, and four contained a mixture of the fertilizer and about 4 U.S. gallons of diesel fuel. Additional materials and tools used for manufacturing the bomb were left in the truck to be destroyed in the blast. After finishing the truck bomb, the two men separated; Nichols returned home to Herington and McVeigh traveled with the truck to Junction City. The bomb cost about $5,000 to make.
Bombing
McVeigh's original plan had been to detonate the bomb at 11:00 am, but at dawn on April 19, 1995, he decided instead to destroy the building at 9:00 am. As he drove toward the Murrah Federal Building in the Ryder truck, McVeigh carried with him an envelope containing pages from “The Turner Diaries,” a fictional account of white supremacists who ignite a revolution by blowing up the FBI headquarters at 9:15 one morning using a truck bomb. McVeigh wore a printed T-shirt with the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Sic semper tyarnnis or “Thus always to tyrants" — what according to legend Brutus said as he assassinated Julius Caesar and is also claimed to have been shouted by John Wilkes Booth immediately after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — and "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" from Thomas Jefferson. He also carried an envelope full of revolutionary materials that included a bumper sticker with the slogan, falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson, "When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." Underneath, McVeigh had written, "Maybe now, there will be liberty!" with a hand-copied quote by John Locke asserting that a man has a right to kill someone who takes away his liberty.
McVeigh entered Oklahoma City at 8:50 am. At 8:57 am, the Regency Towers Apartments' lobby security camera that had recorded Nichols's pickup truck three days earlier recorded the Ryder truck heading towards the Murrah Federal Building. At the same moment, McVeigh lit the five-minute fuse. Three minutes later, still a block away, he lit the two-minute fuse. He parked the Ryder truck in a drop-off zone situated under the building's day-care center, exited and locked the truck. As he headed to his getaway vehicle, he dropped the keys to the truck a few blocks away.
At 9:02 a.m., the Ryder truck, containing over 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane and diesel fuel mixture, detonated in front of the north side of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. 168 people were killed and hundreds more injured. One third of the building was destroyed by the explosion, which created a 30-foot-wide, 8-foot-deep crater on NW 5th Street next to the building. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 4-block radius, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings. The broken glass alone accounted for 5 percent of the death total and 69 percent of the injuries outside the Murrah Federal Building. The blast destroyed or burned 86 cars around the site. The destruction of the buildings left several hundred people homeless and shut down a number of offices in downtown Oklahoma City. The explosion was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of damage.
The effects of the blast were equivalent to over 5,000 pounds of TNT and could be heard and felt up to 55 miles away. Seismometers at the Omniplex Science Museum in Oklahoma City, 4.3 miles away, and in Norman, Oklahoma, 16.1 miles away, recorded the blast as measuring approximately 3.0 on the Richter magnitude scale.
The collapse of the northern half of the building took roughly 7 seconds. As the truck exploded, it first destroyed the column next to it, designated as G20, and shattered the entire glass facade of the building. The shockwave of the explosion forced the lower floors upwards, before the fourth and fifth floors collapsed onto the third floor, which housed a transfer beam that ran the length of the building and was being supported by four pillars below and was supporting the pillars that hold the upper floors. The added weight meant that the third floor gave way along with the transfer beam, which in turn caused the collapse of the building.
Arrests
Initially, the FBI had three hypotheses about responsibility for the bombing: international terrorists, possibly the same group that had carried out the World Trade Center bombing; a drug cartel, carrying out an act of vengeance against DEA agents in the building's DEA office; and anti-government radicals attempting to start a rebellion against the federal government.
McVeigh was arrested within 90 minutes of the explosion, as he was traveling north on Interstate 35 near Perry in Noble County, Oklahoma. Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hanger stopped McVeigh for driving his yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis without a license plate and arrested him for having a concealed weapon. For his home address, McVeigh falsely claimed he resided at Terry Nichols's brother James's house in Michigan. After booking McVeigh into jail, Trooper Hanger searched his patrol car and found a business card which had been concealed by McVeigh after being handcuffed. Written on the back of the card, which was from a Wisconsin military surplus store, were the words "TNT at $5 a stick. Need more." The card was later used as evidence during McVeigh's trial.
While investigating the vehicle identification number on an axle of the truck used in the explosion and the remnants of the license plate, federal agents were able to link the truck to a specific Ryder rental agency in Junction City, Kansas. Using a sketch created with the assistance of Eldon Elliot, owner of the agency, the agents were able to implicate McVeigh in the bombing. McVeigh was also identified by Lea McGown of the Dreamland Motel, who remembered him parking a large yellow Ryder truck in the lot; McVeigh had signed in under his real name at the motel, using an address that matched the one on his forged license and the charge sheet at the Perry Police Station. Before signing his real name at the motel, McVeigh had used false names for his transactions. However, McGown noted, "People are so used to signing their own name that when they go to sign a phony name, they almost always go to write, and then look up for a moment as if to remember the new name they want to use. That's what [McVeigh] did, and when he looked up I started talking to him, and it threw him."
After an April 21, 1995 court hearing on the gun charges, but before McVeigh's release, federal agents took him into custody as they continued their investigation into the bombing. Rather than talk to investigators about the bombing, McVeigh demanded an attorney. Having been tipped off by the arrival of police and helicopters that a bombing suspect was inside, a restless crowd began to gather outside the jail. While McVeigh's requests for a bulletproof vest or transport by helicopter were denied, authorities did use a helicopter to transport him from Perry to Oklahoma City.
Federal agents obtained a warrant to search the house of McVeigh's father, Bill, after which they broke down the door and wired the house and telephone with listening devices. FBI investigators used the resulting information gained, along with the fake address McVeigh had been using, to begin their search for the Nichols brothers, Terry and James. On April 21, 1995, Terry Nichols learned that he was being hunted, and turned himself in. Investigators discovered incriminating evidence at his home: ammonium nitrate and blasting caps, the electric drill used to drill out the locks at the quarry, books on bomb-making, a copy of “Hunter” — a 1989 novel by William Luther Pierce, the founder and chairman of the National Alliance, a white nationalist group and a hand-drawn map of downtown Oklahoma City, on which the Murrah Building and the spot where McVeigh's getaway car was hidden were marked. After a nine-hour interrogation, Terry Nichols was formally held in federal custody until his trial. On April 25, 1995, James Nichols was also arrested, but he was released after 32 days due to lack of evidence. McVeigh's sister Jennifer was accused of illegally mailing ammunition to McVeigh, but she was granted immunity in exchange for testifying against him.
A Jordanian American man traveling from his home in Oklahoma City to visit family in Jordan on April 19, 1995, was also arrested, amid concern that Middle Eastern terrorists could have been behind the attack. Further investigation cleared the man of any involvement in the bombing.
Casualties
An estimated 646 people were inside the building when the bomb exploded. By the end of the day, 14 adults and six children were confirmed dead, and over 100 injured. The toll eventually reached 168 confirmed dead, not including an unmatched left leg that could have belonged to an unidentified 169th victim or could have belonged to any one of eight victims who had been buried without a left leg. Most of the deaths resulted from the collapse of the building, rather than the bomb blast itself. Those killed included 163 who were in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, one person in the Athenian Building, one woman in a parking lot across the street, a man and woman in the Oklahoma Water Resources building and a rescue worker struck on the head by debris.
The victims ranged in age from three months to 73 years and included three pregnant women. Of the dead, 108 worked for the federal government: Drug Enforcement Administration (5), Secret Service (6), Department of Housing and Urban Development (35), Department of Agriculture (7), Customs Office (2), Department of Transportation/Federal Highway (11), General Services Administration (2) and the Social Security Administration (40). Eight of the federal government victims were federal law enforcement agents. Of those law enforcement agents, four were members of the U.S. Secret Service; two were members of the U.S. Customs Service; one was a member of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration; one was a member of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Six of the victims were U.S. military personnel; two were members of the U.S. Army; two were members of the U.S. Air Force; two were members of the U.S. Marine Corps. The rest of the victims were civilians, including 19 children, of whom 15 were in the America's Kids Day Care Center. The bodies of the 168 victims were identified at a temporary morgue set up at the scene. A team of 24 identified the victims using full-body X-rays, dental examinations, fingerprinting, blood tests and DNA testing. More than 680 people were injured. The majority of the injuries were abrasions, severe burns and bond fractures.
McVeigh later acknowledged the casualties, saying, "I didn't define the rules of engagement in this conflict. The rules, if not written down, are defined by the aggressor. It was brutal, no holds barred. Women and kids were killed at Waco and Ruby Ridge. You put back in [the government's] faces exactly what they're giving out." He later stated, "I wanted the government to hurt like the people of Waco and Ruby Ridge had."
Humanitarian aid
The national humanitarian response was immediate, and in some cases even overwhelming. Large numbers of items such as wheelbarrows, bottled water, helmet lights, knee pads, rain gear and even football helmets were donated. The sheer quantity of such donations caused logistical and inventory control problems until drop-off centers were set up to accept and sort the goods. The Oklahoma Restaurant Association, which was holding a trade show in the city, assisted rescue workers by providing 15,000 to 20,000 meals over a ten-day period.
The Salvation Army served over 100,000 meals and provided over 100,000 ponchos, gloves, hard hats and knee pads to rescue workers. Local residents and those from further afield responded to the requests for blood donations. Of the over 9,000 units of blood donated, 131 units were used; the rest were stored in blood banks.
Children affected
In the wake of the bombing, the national media focused on the fact that 19 of the victims had been babies and children, many in the day-care center. At the time of the bombing, there were 100 day-care centers in the United States in 7,900 federal buildings. McVeigh later stated that he was unaware of the day-care center when choosing the building as a target, and if he had known "... it might have given me pause to switch targets. That's a large amount of collateral damage.” The FBI stated that McVeigh scouted the interior of the building in December 1994 and likely knew of the day-care center before the bombing. In April 2010, Joseph Hartzler, the prosecutor at McVeigh's trial, questioned how he could have decided to pass over a prior target building because of an included florist shop but at the Murrah building not "... notice that there's a child day-care center there, that there was a credit union there and a Social Security office?"
Schools across the country were dismissed early and ordered closed. A photograph of firefighter Chris Fields emerging from the rubble with infant Baylee Almon, who later died in a nearby hospital, was reprinted worldwide and became a symbol of the attack. The photo, taken by bank employee Charles H. Porter IV, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and appeared on newspapers and magazines for months following the attack. Aren Almon Kok, mother of Baylee Almon, said of the photo: "It was very hard to go to stores because they are in the checkout aisle. It was always there. It was devastating. Everybody had seen my daughter dead. And that's all she became to them. She was a symbol. She was the girl in the fireman's arms. But she was a real person that got left behind."
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