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Jan. 8, 1997 - Bill Cooper
02:04:09
Oklahoma City – Day One #2
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The End.
See Me.
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You're listening to the Hour of the Times.
I'm William Cooper.
Ladies and gentlemen, we began yesterday reading from a new book, Oklahoma City, Day One, written by Michelle Marie Moore and published by the Harvest Trust, Eager Arizona.
And we will continue today.
If you would like to obtain a copy of Oklahoma City, Day One, Please send $34.95.
Make check or money order payable to Harvest.
H-A-R-V-E-S-T.
That's Harvest.
And send it to Harvest at P.O.
Box 1970, Eager, Arizona 85925.
Eager, Arizona, 85925.
That's $34.95.
Make check or money order payable to Harvest and send it to Harvest, Post Office Box 1970.
Eager, spelled E-A-G-A-R, Arizona, 85925.
Thank you.
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed girl?
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed soul?
Oh, where have you been, my darling of the world?
I've thrown those eyes from the mountains I wonder how long it's been since we parted.
I've danced in the middle of seven sad forests I've been out in trouble a thousand days
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouths of graveyards And it's hard, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard
And I've been down in the valley of the forest And I've been in the valley of the forest
And I've been in the valley of the forest And I've been down in the valley of the forest
And I've been down in the valley of the forest And I've been in the valley of the forest
And I've been in the valley of the forest And I've been in the valley of the forest
And I've been in the valley of the forest And I've been in the valley of the forest
And it's hard, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard And I've been in the valley of the forest
I've been reaching for the branches of a tree I've been reaching for the bottom of a river
And I've been in the valley of the river And I've been in the valley of the river
And I've been in the valley of the river The children in the second floor daycare center have been
eating breakfast at the side of the room at approximately 9 a.m.
Thank you.
The north wall of the daycare center, which faced Northwest Fifth Street, had been blown outward, and the inner wall that buried the children had also been blown outward from the inside of the building, crushing them, where they sat at the breakfast table.
Later in the investigation, the spokesman for the medical examiner's office, Ray Blakeney, would report that the bodies of some victims had been blown outward from the building through concrete walls and into the street.
One rescue worker on the scene commented about the instability of the building.
Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Kyle Greenfield left the building saying, that building could go at any minute.
It totally shook off its foundation.
But the building stretched four stories deep into the earth.
A single car bomb, located 15 to 20 feet from the building at street level, would not have greatly affected the underground structure.
Only explosive devices placed within the building, on the support columns, could have shaken the building from its underground foundation.
Jim Hargrove worked in the office of the Inspector General for the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
His office was located on the south side of the building.
Mr. Hargrove said, The most disconcerting thing about my office is, there is an office to the right of me and an office to the left of me.
And after the explosion, there was just nothing there.
It was bare.
I looked out from my office, which was on the south side, and normally I couldn't see anything except the other offices, and there was nothing there at all.
No offices!
Instead, I could see my car out in the parking lot, on fire.
We tied curtains together and lowered ourselves through the window of the third floor to escape.
Something was terribly wrong with the big picture.
If the bomb had been in the street, why wasn't the front of the building blown into the building?
Why was the damage so asymmetrical?
Why was so much of the building destroyed?
Why had the columns in the building collapsed vertically, as if they had been sliced away from the foundation?
Within a few hours of the event, members of the news media suddenly began stressing, with much repetition, That there had been only one explosion.
They all stated too emphatically, too many times, that the one explosion alone had done all of the damage that we were seeing on television.
I silently wondered about these strange contradictions.
I wondered why the media had stopped airing the interviews of the witnesses who had heard two explosions, who had seen two pillars of smoke, who had felt two concussions.
Right before my very eyes, within only a few hours after the explosions, the official story of the event was being carefully crafted, cautiously molded, and delicately manipulated away from the testimony of witnesses to become something else entirely, some fiction that had virtually nothing to do with what had occurred I wondered who was doing it, and why.
But most of all, I wondered why no one else seemed to be asking any questions.
Charles Caleb Colton said in 1825, and I quote, Examinations are formidable, even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
Barely an hour had passed since the explosion.
The television stations were endlessly rerunning the aerial shots of the Federal Building, taken moments after the bombing by video cameras mounted in their helicopters.
Anchor desk personnel tried in vain to find the appropriate words to explain to the viewing public what had happened.
But on the scanner radios, there was no poetic explanation.
No Pulitzer Prize winning poem.
There was no one to translate the information coming across that medium, and there was no way to wrap the event in a nice newsroom package.
It was raw.
And it was happening right then.
The first call for emergency help had been received by the Oklahoma City Fire Department three seconds after the explosions.
We have a large column of smoke to the south of this address.
We just heard some loud explosions!
Within seconds of that call for assistance, reports of injuries at the scene began pouring over the scanner.
We have several injuries downtown on an explosion at the YMCA on 5th.
There's injuries all over the place downtown!
Oklahoma City firefighter, Monty Baxter, arriving at the disaster at 9.03 a.m.
was the first fireman on the scene.
He radioed back to fire department headquarters.
This explosion is at the corner of 5th Street and Robinson.
We have multiple injuries.
Other fire trucks began to arrive, driving into the dense black smoke.
From the scanner, we heard, We need to get a pumper over here on Robinson.
We could put out these car fires and cut down on the black smoke a little bit.
As one group of Firefighters concentrated on putting out the fires in the parking lot across the street from the Murrah building.
Others began trying to assess the number and the nature of the injuries.
Said Sergeant Eric Thompson, there were people crawling, just stumbling out to the street.
Several people were bleeding.
There was debris everywhere.
There was still stuff falling out of the air.
Within minutes, medical personnel began arriving at the scene in great numbers.
Paramedic Mark Robinson stated, I and my partner and five other paramedics in plain clothes all piled in the back of one of the ambulances at headquarters and we headed down to the scene immediately.
Many, many medics came rushing from area hospitals.
Some drove downtown from their homes and some drove miles from out of town to assist in any way possible.
One hospital later reported receiving telephone calls from as far away as Illinois, asking if any additional help was needed.
Within the first hour, volunteers had arrived at all Oklahoma City hospitals in such great numbers that there was a doctor available for every injured person needing treatment and at least one nurse.
Sometimes two or more, to assist every doctor.
Upon arriving at the bomb site, emergency medical technician Scott Moore stated, We were immediately swarmed by about twenty or thirty people, all with lacerations to the face.
Some had chest injuries, some were pale, apparently in shock, all saying, Can you do something?
And, Can you help us?
Within those early moments, the scope of the disaster became apparent from the scanner reports.
We're reporting multiple incidents inside the county courthouse in the YMCA building.
Mass casualty incident at that location over a six block area.
We're not sure what the center of the explosion was at this time.
At 9.08 a.m., witnesses monitoring the scanners knew exactly where this disaster had occurred, and from that source the news media went into action informing the world.
The words of the firefighter reporting what he saw sent waves of shock through everyone listening.
The whole front of the federal building is gone, all floors to the roof.
The blast had not only devastated the Murrah Federal Building, but had also destroyed cars, tossed a tractor-trailer rig through a fence, crushed brick walls, collapsed smaller concrete buildings in the area, caused foundations to shift in the larger buildings nearby, and shattered windows for miles around.
Eventually, many other buildings in the area would be searched for possible victims and assessed for structural damage.
The final toll of damaged buildings would exceed 200.
Responding to the urgent requests for assistance, the Norman Police Department sent two medical crews of six people, along with Captain Phil Cotton and the Emergency Medical Service Disaster Bus, Which could be used as a triage center capable of treating a large number of injured.
The disaster bus was then stationed at the corner of Northwest 6th and Robinson Street to handle triage from that location.
The purpose of a triage station in a mass casualty incident is to sort the merely injured from the dying and the dead.
To prioritize the needs for medical treatment.
Scott Moore explained the triage function in more detail.
The unresponsive patients, the patients with mortal injuries like the tracheal lacerations, the woman with the portion of the filing cabinet impaled into her chest, still stuck there, those people went out first.
Ones that had severe injuries were set in another section.
They were also laying down.
Then we had a section for the walking wounded.
Those were the people there that had brass cuts that looked severe, but really weren't severe.
Said paramedic Don Carter, we couldn't tie up our complete attention for those that were still able to walk.
There were more critical patients that needed our attention that were either unconscious or couldn't walk due to their injuries.
Calls for medical help dominated the scanner traffic.
We've got a lot of victims here at... What the hell is that?
6th and Robinson.
I'm at 5th and Harvey.
We've got quite a few injured right here.
We need some help.
I need at least 3 ambulances at the corner of 5th and Hudson.
I've got 3 patients that are in critical condition.
We've got about 4 or 5 criticals right now.
About 100 walking wounded.
We've got 2 critical at 10th and Hudson.
We need a unit.
I'm at 4th and Harvey.
I need a hospital.
I've got one critical head and eye.
We're getting ready to depart.
We've got two critical and one walking wounded.
Can you advise which hospital?
We're starting to run into equipment shortages.
The squad that is stationed at Station 1, have them gather up the medical supplies and run down to Northwest 5th and Robinson.
Norman Regional Hospital sent fifteen medical staff members and many supplies to aid in the rescue operation.
Paramedic instructors from the Moore Norman Vocational Technical Center coordinated in staffing of the EMS disaster bus, said one medical technician.
We had approximately fifteen to twenty people laying on the ground with various types of injuries.
There was enough blood covering each person that I didn't know who was injured and who wasn't injured.
You literally just had to go up and ask them.
Are you hurt?
Additional triage units were quickly established on the east and south sides of the Muir building,
often moving from place to place wherever triage was needed at the time.
� The old post office building located south of the federal courthouse on Dean A. McGee Street was transformed into a temporary hospital.
Television cameras captured the scene of a double line of 14 ambulances removing the injured.
In the early moments after the explosions, ambulance service provider, EMSA, had requested that the Norman ambulances provide coverage to the Moore and South Oklahoma City areas.
But, within a half hour of making that request, EMSA summoned all available ambulances in the surrounding metropolitan areas to the scene of the disaster.
When all of the statistics were compiled several months later, we learned that there had been sixty-six emergency medical units involved in the rescue operation.
Thirty-four from Oklahoma City, twenty-nine from mutual aid, that's surrounding communities, and three from Tulsa.
The number of people transported by these medical units was two hundred and fifteen.
95 by EMSA, 44 by mutual aid, and 76 by other means, bus or police vehicle.
An unknown number of patients were transported by private civilian vehicles.
Two command units were on the scene within two minutes of the explosions, and three life support units were placed on 24-hour standby.
The response to the bombing utilized 165 EMSA employees, and the helicopters involved in the rescue operation came from Metaflight, Oklahoma, and Fort Sill mass flights.
Other emergency medical service agencies involved in the rescue operations came from Anadarko, Ardmore, Carnegie, McLean, that's McLean County, Purcell, Senior, Stephens, that's Stephen County, Stillwater, Watonga, Wellston, Impact EMS, EMSA Eastern Division, Life EMS, and Lightsat EMS.
Emergency personnel associated with EMS agencies were supplemented by more than twice as many medically trained volunteers who assisted in the rescue operations.
In spite of the fact that their numbers can be estimated, but not accurately calculated, their service was needed, appreciated, and invaluable.
We will also never know how many of the injured were taken to area hospitals in the vehicles of private civilians.
A large number of emergency vehicles was available at the scene, but the number of injured far exceeded the capacity of those vehicles.
Without the willingness of private citizens to transport the wounded to area hospitals in their own cars, trucks, or vans, the death toll might have been much greater.
That willingness of heart to serve in whatever capacity needed made the difference between life and death for many of the injured.
Within the first hour after the bombing, St.
Anthony Hospital sent out an emergency call for blood and requested that all off-duty medical employees report to the hospital.
Similar calls for medical personnel went out from all metro area hospitals.
It was called Condition Black, a state of total emergency that required every available medic to be on hand in a state of readiness.
The Cleveland County, which is the Norman Red Cross, announced that the disaster had
placed a tremendous drain on the blood supply, and asked everyone who was at least seventeen
years old, in good health, and who weighed at least one hundred and ten pounds to come
to the Red Cross Blood Center at Max Westheimer Airfield, located in north central Norman.
Within thirty minutes of the announcement, the blood donation center was overwhelmed
with donors.
The parking lot was filled to capacity, and cars were parked for hundreds of yards along the roadway and in the grassy fields surrounding the center.
Within two hours, the Norman Red Cross announced that they could take no further donors at
the Westheimer location because the response to the call had been so generous.
A secondary blood donation center was hastily set up on Haley Drive near the University
of Oklahoma campus in the Delta Gamma House.
It also rapidly filled to capacity with volunteer donors.
The Oklahoma Blood Institute's Sylvia N. Goldman Center, located within five miles of the Muir Building, put out a call for donors.
Within minutes, its parking lot was filled and cars were parked on the street, on the sidewalks, in the center medians of the roadway, and on the grass for blocks surrounding the Blood Institute, creating an incredible tangle of traffic in the downtown area.
The line of donors quickly filled the lobby and spilled onto the lawn.
In order to accommodate the number of blood donors, secondary donor centers were set up at the nearby Crerion Hotel and at Tinker Air Force Base.
Soon, word came that the University Hospital Mobile Blood Donation Unit was filled to capacity.
The Edmond Blood Institute, north of Oklahoma City, was also full, and secondary sites were established in that community to accommodate donors.
For the volunteer donors waiting in line, some of whom waited for many hours, it was all they could do to help.
Everyone wanted to assist in some way, and the public response to the calls for blood was instant and overwhelming.
The Red Cross set up a large supply depot and triage unit in the Oklahoma Publishing
Company warehouse located at Northwest Fifth and Oklahoma Street.
As the rescue operation progressed, this warehouse would also serve first as a triage unit and
later as a temporary morgue.
There were two hundred and fifty Red Cross volunteers dispatched, and another two hundred
who signed up for relief duty.
Before arriving at the Red Cross supply depot were many uniformed men and women from Tinker
Air Force Base's 38th Engineering Installation Wing Headquarters, which specializes in communications.
They had come to assist in coordinating the communications between the different medical units on the scene, law enforcement personnel, firefighters, and the other specialized rescue teams that were arriving.
Dozens of counselors Psychologists, mental health workers, ministers and priests arrived to aid the wounded and to comfort and counsel the family members who had loved ones trapped inside the Muir Building.
Later in the day, specialized counseling, called Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, was made immediately available for every worker who came out of the Muir Building because of the extremely disturbing and emotionally wrenching situation The viewers were confronted.
Food and supplies donated by the public began pouring into the Red Cross Depot in such quantities that storage space was at a premium.
The Red Cross issued an announcement that they would ask for specific items when it was known exactly what was needed and graciously asked the generous public to wait before driving into the downtown area.
Traffic for miles around the blast site was at a complete standstill at that moment, and it was too early to know what more was going to be required.
Everyone was urgently searching for some way to help.
The only way to know what was needed was to stay tuned to the television and the local news radio stations.
The scenes on television were extremely graphic, raw, and for the most part, unedited.
Time and again, viewers were warned about the explicit, the violent nature of the broadcasts for the sake of any children who might become upset by what they saw.
The warning could have been issued for viewers of any age or experience.
We were seeing a bloodbath.
As one news anchorman defined it, this is a disaster of international proportions.
The people who came stumbling out of the ruins of the buildings had had their clothing torn off or ripped to shreds by pouring glass.
One man removed his own clothing to cover a bleeding victim lying in shock on a stretcher in the street.
A rescue volunteer who ran to the scene from the Kerr-McGee Corporation complex wrapped a small boy in his own dress shirt and stayed with the child, warming him and speaking tenderly to him, until the child could be transported to a local hospital for treatment.
U.S.
District Judge Gary Purcell, who had come running from his courtroom in the federal courthouse behind the Muir Building, wrapped one of the injured in his judge's robe.
The walking wounded carried the more seriously injured out of area buildings, often assisted by unknown civilian volunteers.
Two men carried a woman with a profusely bleeding leg wound to volunteer medics by using an office chair as a litter Other civilians loaded the injured into their own cars or laid them in the beds of pickup trucks to transport them to area hospitals.
So many volunteers helped so many victims.
Some of the injured would never know the names of the persons who helped save their lives.
Some would later be reunited with their rescuers and with grateful tears embrace one another as if they were family members meeting after many years absence.
A volunteer carrying a small boy to the medics for treatment was asked by a television reporter, Do you know who that is you are carrying?
He replied, No.
And that was so often the story.
Those who could walk helped those who could not, and this selfless gift of assistance to strangers was given over and over again by hundreds of people throughout the morning.
It was simply the right thing to do, and no one ever gave it a second thought.
Reporters from every local media source had converged on the area, collecting curbside interviews with victims, civilian volunteers, local business owners, rescue workers, hospital personnel, and, later, from federal officials.
It would be mid-afternoon before members of the national news media descended on Oklahoma City in droves.
during the earliest hours of coverage, the local media struggled to convey to the rest
of the world the scope of the disaster that had occurred in our capital city in what would
be forever called the Heartland.
The Heartland.
the the
you the
the the
I'm William Cooper and you're listening to the Hour of the Time brought to you by Swiss America Trading.
you.
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There was a time when anybody could hold in their hands a real, genuine, solid silver dollar.
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Real constitutional money.
And for those of you who think that this is just a bunch of baloney, why pay attention to it?
Well, you see, the Constitution for the United States of America is the supreme law of the land.
And if our money has been debased, counterfeited, If we are using unconstitutional money, what else is unconstitutional?
Why are we required to obey the law, but the federal government is not?
And it's not just money that they are ignoring.
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Everyone knows it.
Everyone can feel it in their gut.
Not too many people can tell you exactly what it is.
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Ladies and gentlemen, and do it now.
I'm going to be very brief.
To the television audience, the sight of the mural building defied description, but the details of the experience and the aftermath were unimaginable.
Gradually, the accounts of the survivors and eyewitnesses began to emerge, and the emotional horror of the event was given voice.
The interviews were disturbing and shocking, The people interviewed were themselves in shock.
Many had barely escaped with their lives, and some were bleeding and trembling, answering reporters' questions as medics cleaned and bandaged their wounds.
We were about to get our first taste of what would eventually become over a thousand personal accounts of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
David Sykes, a mail carrier, was in the mail room in the basement of the Federal Building when the explosions occurred.
He stated that at first he thought it was a boiler explosion.
He and several other mail carriers ran into the hallway and found it destroyed and in flames.
Sykes said, There was glass and fire everywhere.
We just got out of there.
But upon reaching the street level, the sight of what had happened stunned Sykes completely.
He instantly realized it had not been a boiler explosion.
Man, it must have been a bomb.
I know it was a bomb, he said, and I'll tell you what was really weird.
And when we got out, there were cop cars and ambulances everywhere, and it took us only
about forty seconds to get out of the basement.
Of even greater interest was the fact that Sykes reported fire in the basement level
of the building, supposedly caused by an explosion that occurred outside the building up at the
street level.
.
Third-year nursing student and member of the Oklahoma Air National Guard Donna Trimble was hurrying to class at the University Health Sciences Center.
She was going to be late to class because of a flat time, which had delayed her arrival.
Trimble was about six blocks away from the Muir building when the force of the explosions slammed into her car.
At first I thought I'd had a wreck, Trimble said, explaining that the jolt had caused her head to hit the windshield.
And then, when I realized I didn't have a wreck, I thought it was maybe some sort of building demolition downtown.
Seeing an Oklahoma City Fire Department truck rushing past her into the downtown area, Trimble followed it.
Then she saw the building.
It was the worst thing I've ever seen.
There was a lot of confusion.
Abandoning her car and rushing into the scene on foot, Trimble ran through the thick black smoke rising from the parking lot full of burning vehicles and helped remove an injured woman from a crushed car.
When the woman had been safely placed in the hands of other medics, Trimble hurried toward the building.
Water was gushing into the lower levels of the building and people were yelling for someone to shut off the power in the water.
I saw one man sitting in his office.
I could tell from where I was standing that he was dead.
The whole wall of his office was gone.
Trimble continued working throughout the morning in the triage units around the Murrah building, helping in whatever way she could.
Sam Patterson was employed in the office of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, located on the south side of the third floor of the Muir Building.
He described his experience.
It wasn't really loud.
It was more of a muffled noise.
But immediately after the explosion, I could see clear through the building and out the other side.
I could see the parking lot across the street, and all the cars looked like they were on fire.
The ceiling of Patterson's office had collapsed, but fortunately the floor beneath him held firm.
Everyone from Patterson's office made it safely out of the building with only a few minor injuries.
Witnesses saw two employees from the ninth floor office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms staggering around without shirts, the torn rags of their trousers bloody, Jim's stags bleeding profusely from the head and chest, told the media that he had been talking on the phone in the BATF office when he heard the explosions.
We were just trying to get out of there, he said as the medic cleaned and bandaged his wounds.
The doors were locked.
We couldn't get out.
We were just trying to find a way out.
Debris was everywhere.
The second BATF employee, Vernon Busser, was covered with glass cuts.
He described the scene within the building as frantic.
He said, I felt the explosion come from my left and then there was this force of pressure and debris started falling and glass flying.
Immediately after making this statement to the press, Buster laid down on the street, weak and white with shock.
Captain Henderson Baker, was not sitting at his desk at the time of the explosions.
Baker worked in the Department of the Army's Oklahoma City Recruiting Company headquarters.
He stated that he was standing talking to a co-worker when suddenly he began falling.
The portion of the fourth floor office in which his desk was located had disappeared into the dust, smoke, and crashing concrete.
I just didn't know what was going on.
I was surrounded by black smoke.
It was dark, black.
And I was falling.
I landed on the first floor and saw a light ahead.
I just walked toward it.
Dazed and shaken, Baker miraculously managed to walk directly out onto Northwest Fifth Street.
With blood flowing down his face, internal injuries, abrasions, an injured arm and multiple bruises, Baker then went back inside the building to search for his co-workers, but after the first hour, six were still missing.
Henderson was eventually taken to Mercy Health Center for medical treatment.
One man, who did not identify himself, told reporters, I had a meeting with the building manager and he and I had just left the meeting.
We walked out to the elevator shaft.
We were out by the elevator when all of a sudden I heard a big boom.
Everything went black, and things were falling in on us.
There was thick dust everywhere.
You could hardly breathe.
So I yelled for the building manager, and I finally heard him answer me.
Although he had been standing right next to me when the blast took place, I couldn't find him afterward.
Finally, we connected, and he and I tried going out together.
We found a couple of ladies caught in the debris.
We helped get them out.
All of us went out together.
We finally found an exit.
I thought I was going out the front door, but somehow we ended up going out a side door.
Everything was just debris and rubble.
The building had collapsed around us.
It was so dark and dusty you could hardly breathe.
You just had to survive to get out.
Deputy County Assessor Tim Gilbert had run from his office a block away when he felt the force of the explosions.
Upon reaching the Mirror Building, he was stunned by what he saw.
It was like a big concrete tomb.
It was incredible.
Everything was collapsing down on everything.
He heard a call for help under a pile of concrete, but when he reached the pile of rubble, the call for help had stopped.
Then he found a woman's hand.
We dug down to her, and I saw the wedding ring on her finger.
I felt her pulse, and she was dead.
She was pregnant.
I couldn't get her out by myself.
I thought maybe If we got her out, we could save the baby, but we couldn't do it alone.
The vertical collapse of the support columns and the subsequent pancaking of the floors of the Muir building resulted in a pile of rubble some twenty-five feet high.
The angle of the collapsed floors had created a chute down which workers, office furniture, fixtures, and building debris had fallen.
Tim Gilbert climbed on the two-story pile of debris, and with five other men, formed a human chain.
Together, they worked eagerly to pull people out of a sinkhole in the middle of the building.
They were lifting people out, and we would grab them.
There were people yelling, I don't know what happened to those voices.
The last five minutes we were in there, we couldn't hear them anymore.
We got seven people out, two adults and five kids.
When asked if he felt like a hero, Gilbert said, No, I'm not a hero.
They needed help.
Everyone was trying to do what they could.
An employee from the fifth floor of the Muir building described how he survived the explosions.
I went under the table when the ceiling started to cave in.
That saved me, I guess.
And others had a similar story.
One man claimed, When I crawled out from under the desk, there wasn't any building left around us.
Our whole office area was gone.
My floor was okay, and the ceiling had come down.
But there was still concrete above, so it was just the corner of the office that was left that we were in.
Everybody else that we work with is gone.
Dr. Brian Espy, a veterinarian for the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, survived the bombing and said he never dreamed the building in which he had worked for six years would be the target of a terrorist attack.
In a statement released to the press in the late morning, Dr. Esty said his entire staff of seven people was gone, lost somewhere in the rubble of the building.
All but a few of the offices in his area of the building, fifth floor, disappeared in the rumbling collapse.
Fellow Agricultural Department employee Jack Gobin said that at first he thought it was an earthquake.
He felt the force first, and then the windows blew into his office.
Gobin said he got under his desk and was not hurt.
Both Gobin and Espy said they feel very, very lucky to be alive.
Many of their co-workers did not escape the disaster.
Registered nurse Tony Garrett worked all day and into the night up until the time the FBI took over the medical operations.
Tony stated, When we went over to the south side of the building, I had noticed several citizens, police officers and firemen, who were trying to dig at the rubble, trying to get the people out.
And on the upper floors, there were people that were sitting at their desks, that when you first looked at them, you really didn't know that they were dead.
But when you got a closer look, you saw that there was no way they could be dead.
Just sitting there alive with metal fragments through their bodies.
It seemed like there were people just sitting at their desks waiting for someone to come and get them.
Television reporters conducted an interview with an unidentified male who had escaped from the building, but then tried to go back inside to rescue his co-workers.
The man was shaken and stunned.
We couldn't get back there.
Stuff was falling down and we started throwing stuff out looking for people.
We couldn't find anybody.
We were hollering.
We went around the north side of the building, and then that's when I saw it.
I cannot believe it.
You could see the crater.
It looked like a car or something had been parked directly in front of the glass doors at the street.
The crater, it did make a hole in the ground, but you could see everything.
There was rebar as big around as my arm, bent over like a pretzel.
You could see where the blast was.
There was definitely a crater in the street in front of the Muir building, but neither witnesses nor officials could ever seem to agree upon its size.
Some said it was thirty feet wide, others said twenty.
The general consensus was that the crater's depth was eight feet, although one member of the National Guard stated it was twelve feet.
It was difficult to estimate depth because of the amount of debris piled everywhere, and at no time was the public informed that anyone had measured the depth or diameter of the crater.
Published Aerial Associated Press laser photos clearly show the crater from different angles.
The diameter of the crater can be estimated relative to the size of vehicles located on a plane parallel to the crater.
Such estimates indicate that the diameter was probably not in excess of 25 feet.
There is a more accurate estimate available.
Published in this volume, Oklahoma City Day One, is a photograph of the crater taken by Oscar Johnson on page 62.
Near the crater are several 5-gallon buckets that were used for debris removal.
The buckets are 14 inches tall.
Using that measurement as a reference, it appears that the crater is approximately 20 to 23 feet in diameter.
The depth appears to be approximately 4 feet.
Early in the rescue operation, we were told that the crater was covered with plywood to protect the rescue workers while going into and out of the building.
However, close-up photographic evidence indicates that the crater, which was actually very small, was filled during the search and recovery period.
The flywood appears to cover uneven debris, but is located to the right of the crater.
The crater was always visible after it was filled, yet we were told there was a huge crater beneath the flywood.
The flywood ramps remained in place until the independent investigation conducted by Defense Attorney Stephen Jones and his team of experts.
The investigators who accompanied the defense team into the Ground Zero area were shocked to discover that the alleged huge crater had been filled prior to their inspection, and Jones was later quoted as saying, I don't know when they filled it.
If they filled it after I filed my motion, I frankly would find that disturbing.
Jones also said that his explosives expert from the state of Washington, Sid Woodcock, would have learned more from the inspection if they hadn't filled in the pit area.
No one seemed to notice that the actual bomb crater was very small and had been filled for quite some time.
No one is willing to specify who authorized the filling of the crater, nor has any explanation been forthcoming as to why the crater itself, a vital piece of evidence in the bombing, was irreparably altered before it could be studied and assessed by non-government experts.
Whether or not this tampering with the crater evidence constitutes obstruction of justice remains to be determined.
New American reporter William F. Jasper brought one particular incident to light in his overview of the evidence of internal explosions provided by Brigadier General Benton K. Parton.
See Appendices A and C. Wrote Jasper, One of the more interesting examples of the General's vindication can be found in the official commemorative volume of the Oklahoma City tragedy called, In Their Name.
In the middle of the book is a large illustration of the Muir Building, spanning two pages, pages 86 and 87, and detailing the damage caused by the April 19th blast.
What is quite striking about the illustration is that the artist has obviously moved the bomb crater to the left, so that it is aligned with the deep blast cavity that extends into the building.
What this episode demonstrates is that whether consciously or unconsciously, the illustrator and or the book's producers have attempted to reconcile the conspicuously conflicting data by altering the evidence to fit the official story.
Now, Mr. Jasper's assertions, while intriguing, do not fit the photographic evidence.
General Parton's best estimates place the crater approximately four feet to the right of column A-4, sea appendix C. However, it appears from the aerial photos that the crater is actually about four feet to the left of column A-4.
While this placement concurs with the drawings on pages 86 and 87 of In Their Name, a closer examination of pages 82 and 83 does place the crater to the left of A4.
there does not appear to have been any deliberate attempt to alter the evidence in this manner.
Thank you for your attention.
I'm William Cooper.
Daddy.
Why did you do it?
I don't know.
This is the Voice of Freedom.
Please.
Arf hi!
Light it up, come to power.
Feel the power of the fire.
I don't know what I'm gonna do with your heart and soul, boy.
You're listening to the Hour of the Terram.
I'm William Cooper.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are reading from the book, Oklahoma City, Day One, by Michelle
Marie Moore.
Is documented and sourced by...
There is no conjecture, no rumor.
There are no opinions in this book.
It is all fact.
The criteria for our investigation that anything considered to be evidence had to come from at least two different sources that knew nothing of each other.
If you would like to own a copy of Oklahoma City Day One, and I urge you to get a copy and read it, I also urge you to purchase additional copies to give away to your friends, to your police chief, to your local sheriff.
to those that you believe might help us make a difference in righting this great wrong, and all of the other wrongs that are being perpetrated in the name of Marxist-Socialist world government that are destroying the United States of America.
You can obtain a copy of Oklahoma City Day One by sending $34.95.
Make your check or money order payable to Harvest.
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Send it to Harvest at P.O.
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Make your check or money order payable through Harvest, and send it to Harvest at plb.org.
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If you live in the Springerville, Eager area, you may obtain a copy of Oklahoma City, Day One from Stewart Books on Main Street in Springerville.
Don't go away.
I'll be right back.
the world.
I'm going to be a good boy.
Mr. Jasper's concerns were based on General Parton's placement of the crater, but Parton erred in his assessment by eight feet.
Given the tiny size of the crater, even if the bomb vehicle had been placed directly in front of the deep blast cavity, it would not have caused the damage done to the building and most assuredly would not have brought down Column A-8.
Behind the Mirror Building, on the south side, sits the Federal Courthouse.
At nine o'clock in the morning, U.S.
District Judge Gary Purcell was almost ready to call his court to order.
Suddenly the building began to sway and rock, and Judge Purcell said he felt like his eardrums might burst.
There was a terribly loud noise, and it kind of knocked me forward into the bench.
I caught myself, and someone said, It's an earthquake!
I said, No, it's a bomb!
Everybody, get out!
Forcing open the courtroom door, Purcell and about twenty others escaped from the building.
Said Purcell, it was utter chaos.
There was smoke and heat and screaming.
At first we thought it was our building, but once we were outside we could see the smoke coming from the mirror building.
Glass had shattered throughout the courthouse, but not on the floor of Judge Purcell's courtroom and office.
Bulletproof glass had been installed on Judge Purcell's floor the previous week.
Oklahoma City Attorney Jack Poynter had also been in the federal courthouse that Wednesday morning.
All the windows blew out, he said.
We ran outside.
When I saw the smoke, I thought it was the courthouse, and I started running toward it.
But Poynter soon realized the smoke was coming from the Murrah building.
As he approached it from the south, He couldn't see the devastation that had occurred on the opposite side of the building.
A woman, screaming hysterically, ran up to Poynter, saying, My baby!
My baby is in there!
Other women joined her, all crying about their children.
It was then that Poynter learned that there had been a daycare center located on the second floor of the Muir building.
Poynter tried to calm the women and said that he would go and check on the children.
Just then a policewoman arrived and told them to get out of here.
Poynter told her, we're going to check on these women's babies on the second floor.
The policewoman replied somberly, there is no second floor.
Poynter could then see where the building dropped away to nothing but rubble.
The staircase leading to the daycare center and the door of the center were standing, but beyond that, the center no longer existed.
With the realization that there had been a daycare center in the building, firefighters began making other urgent demands heard on the scanners.
Is there a possibility we can get the police department dogs to help us with locations?
We're supposed to have at least twenty-five to thirty children in this area, and we've only found four or five.
Can we get heat sensors or police dogs?
Please!
Firefighter Monty Baxter, working with his partner in the area that had once been the daycare center, started calling out to the children.
Said Baxter, Danny went left, and I went straight and kind of to the right, hollering out, Please say something!
Holler at us!
We're firefighters!
Is there anybody here?
You've got to make a noise!
We can't see you!
Probably within thirty minutes, we had three children out, freed up, and we handed them over to somebody else.
Of the many children present in the daycare center that morning, Only six would survive.
As the day progressed, the removal of the dead would begin.
Some of the bodies were taken first to the children's playground area on the south side of the Federal Building, and later to the temporary morgue set up in a warehouse at the corner of Northwest Fifth and Oklahoma Streets.
The tearful medical personnel remarked how tragically ironic it was that the dead children should be laid in their own playground, a place in which they would never again play.
In 1989, when the daycare center had first been built, it was called Uncle Sam's Kids' Under the leadership of then Governor Henry Bellman, the General Services Administration had spent $48,000 on sod, fences, and other improvements to provide a scenic, safe outdoor place for the children to play while their parents worked nearby.
At that time, only six years previously, The provision of on-site child care services was considered an excellent employee benefit.
After the Oklahoma City bombing, many who had fought hard to win on-site child care were reconsidering the wisdom of keeping children near any federal office.
It is an issue still being hotly debated and remains unresolved.
On this day, April 19th, The fencing materials, which had previously provided safe boundaries for the children at play, were being used as ladders with which to reach and extract the injured from the Federal Building.
Surrounded by the tiny, often unidentified bodies of the children, wrapped in small blankets and laid side by side in the south playground area, the Rev.
George Miley of the Anglican Church of the Holy Cross Walked among the dead, praying as he carried his open Bible.
I am asking God to receive them, Miley said.
It was the last intercessory act he felt he could perform, an act of peace in the midst of the confusion and turmoil all around him.
According to rescue workers inside the federal building, bodies and severed body parts were scattered everywhere.
Those still living were trapped and crying out for help.
Medical workers who had set up triage centers in the area and makeshift hospitals were hanging IVs on portable metal racks.
Victims were resting on blankets spread out on the concrete.
It was a gruesome scene.
Mike Taylor, Director of Cardiopulmonary Services at Norman Regional Hospital, was quoted as saying, They're having to cut off body parts to get them out of there.
One worker came out with a medical backpack and just collapsed from the intensity of the scene.
In spite of the fact that the rescue workers were being sent into the building for only 30 to 45 minute shifts, many were completely overcome by what they saw inside and by what they had to do while there.
In one unforgettable moment of many that day, television viewers watched in grief as a police officer, stumbling trance-like from the building stopped by the street curb near a parked patrol car, overcome with the emotional stress and tragedy of the event, The officer folded his arms around his face as if to blot out all he had seen, bowed himself over the hood of the vehicle, and wept openly.
and we all wept with him.
Moments later, a fellow officer approached, placed a comforting hand on the man's shoulder,
And together they helped each other leave the horror of their first shift of duty in the Mira Building bombsite.
It was going to be like that for days and weeks to come.
People helping each other cope.
The wounds of that day were not all visible, and many would take far longer to heal than injuries to the physical body.
These were wounds of the heart.
Shock and disbelief were the order of the day.
Medical workers treated a man wandering from the building in a day with cuts and broken bones.
He had lost both arms in the explosion, but seemed strangely unaware of his condition.
A man's body was discovered about a block away to the northwest of the Federal Building in an alley behind the Post Office Resource Center.
Witnesses thought he was a pastor by, but no one seemed to know who he was.
What he was doing, or the exact cause of his death.
One man, covered in blood, was found walking alone along the sidewalk, several blocks away from the Mirror Building.
He said he was going home, but he couldn't remember his name, and he didn't know where his home was.
Behind him was a trail of blood in the shattered glass that carpeted the downtown streets and sidewalks.
Other medical workers handled the bio-bags collecting tissue and body parts from the debris.
They may not ever find some of those people, said Craig Bishop, a member of the American Red Cross Disaster Action Team.
It's that torn up.
I heard moaning, but couldn't tell if it was coming from survivors buried in debris or from people under stress trying to clear away the rubble.
It's bad.
It's real bad.
The dead were so numerous that rescue workers had no choice but to cover most of them and mark the location of the bodies with spray paint on the building debris.
At that time of the crises, the emphasis was still on rescuing the living, and no ambulance could be spared to remove the dead.
Specially trained removal teams would later be brought in to handle the dead.
Across the street to the north of the Mirror Building, David Harper had been sitting at his desk in the Journal Record Building when the explosions occurred.
It felt like somebody slammed me in the back of the head with a bat.
We pushed debris to the side so we could get out.
My office was chest-deep in debris.
Another worker in the Journal Record Building, Ernie Ross, reported that the force of the blast threw him twenty feet across the room into a table.
The windows were all gone and the inside walls collapsed.
You did not know where to run to get out.
It was just frantic.
The flying glass sliced me up.
I was standing with a co-worker.
I hope he's all right.
I'm sure glad to be alive.
I never went through anything like that when I was in Vietnam.
Ross was taken to University Hospital for treatment of large cuts on his leg, facial lacerations, and a crushed nose.
Norman resident Mary Mowdy had just started her third day on the job in the Journal Record Building with the Oklahoma Guaranteed Student Loan Program.
Seated at her desk by a window when the explosions occurred, Mowdy was pierced by thousands of pieces of flying glass.
She was somehow rescued from the scene by co-workers.
After being rushed to Presbyterian Hospital, Mowdy endured more than seven hours of surgery and received over a thousand stitches.
She would again face surgery the next day.
Mowdy suffered a broken arm, cut tendons in her arms, and severe cuts to her lower face and neck.
Of the seven injured, and three critically injured, in the Journal Record Building, she was the most seriously hurt.
Burby Lovelace had been in the Oklahoma City Downtown Lions Club office on the second floor of the YMCA building, which was located a half block to the northeast of the Mira building.
It took us only one and a half to two minutes to get outside, and there were police cars already there, men in their heavy helmets.
Lovelace had just stepped away from her desk when suddenly it was covered with shards of glass, ceiling tiles, and insulation.
The windows blew in and the ceiling fell, she said.
Everything that was not concrete just went.
The force blew me toward the door.
I had glass cuts all the way across my face.
I did what every normal human being does.
I panicked.
I jerked open the door, which was blocked by ceiling tiles, and limped down the hall.
Everybody was screaming and crying.
But we made our way down the stairs.
Lovelace, with several of her co-workers, went back inside the YMCA to remove children from the daycare facility in that building.
She didn't realize how badly she was bleeding until someone handed her a towel.
Strangers walked up and began picking up the children and taking them out into the street.
Parents were running and calling out the names of their children.
One father was so panicky that he didn't see his own daughter in the arms of a man who was holding her right in front of the dead.
Strangers held children who were not their own and waited for parents they did not know.
State Representative Kevin Cox, who was in front of the YMCA in less than a block from the New York building at the time of the explosion, said, All of a sudden I felt like I was in a hammock between two trees in my car.
The windshield shattered and blew me and the car into a building at Northwest Fifth and Broadway.
I was very shocked.
I know I bailed out of my car and fell down several times.
I wanted to run for cover.
The whole side of the building was blown out and every car in the parking lot directly across from the Federal Building was ablaze.
Cars within that block are buried in rubble I could see two people standing in the rubble trying to find a way out.
People who lived in the YMCA came out in their bare underwear.
Todd Pendleton was driving away from the YMCA building where he had just taken his son Evan to daycare.
He heard and felt the initial blast from several blocks away.
He said he thought another car had rear-ended him.
But when he looked back, all he could see was black smoke.
He whipped his car around and drove back and parked as close as he could to the YMCA.
Pendleton got out of his car and began running.
He could see people already removing the 52 children who were in the YMCA daycare center that morning.
Boy, I was running looking everywhere for Evan.
I found him in the arms of a YMCA worker.
That staff was so committed.
They were all hurt and bloody and all they could think about were those kids.
Within seven to ten minutes, all of the children were accounted for and out of the daycare center.
Pendleton began helping the workers remove the children, some of whom were seriously hurt.
He took one injured child to the nearest ambulance for transport to the hospital, but the ambulance medics were treating people at the scene who could not yet be moved.
Realizing he was going to have to take the child himself, Pendleton told YMCA staff members that he was driving the child to St.
Anthony's Hospital.
Pendleton and his son Evan took the injured child to the emergency room and stayed with the child until the parents arrived.
The Regency Tower, a multi-story apartment building located one block west of the Mirror Building, was home to more than 250 residents.
Some of whom had lived there since the building's opening about thirty years earlier.
Deanna Jordan had been in her apartment with her sister-in-law and young daughter.
Deanna said, I thought the people outside doing scaffolding work were coming through the windows until we heard the building alarm telling us to evacuate.
The walls are buckled and cracked.
There's mortar coming off the outside of the building.
Deanna's five-year-old daughter, Melinda, was still shaking and clinging to her mother when she told reporters her own version of what happened.
I heard screams, screams, and everything fell down.
A gentleman known only as Mr. Ramsey was interviewed by a television reporter.
His son works for the Oklahoma City Police Department.
Mr. Ramsey reported to the television media that his son had heard the explosions a few blocks away.
Ramsey said, My son was at the Oklahoma City Police Station.
He said at the time of the explosion about 300 policemen pulled their guns because they thought that someone was in the police department and had set off a bomb there.
He was a bicycle patrolman, and he immediately hurried to the federal building.
He was sharing with us that he had pulled out four two- to three-year-olds that were dead, and I think six adults that were dead.
He's got a daughter that is three years old, and when he got to the part about the kids, he just couldn't stand it too much.
And I can't see how anybody could do this.
It's unreal.
He saw many people who were in great pain, maims, tops of their heads blown off, eyes blown out.
Horrible.
Horrible things.
And to the people that did this, there's no reason for anything like this, none ever.
Local media representatives interviewed Carol Lawton, an elderly woman who was trapped in a blanket, who was wrapped in a blanket to protect against the onset of shock while she was being assisted by medical personnel.
She had great difficulty speaking, as if her mouth could not form the words her mind was thinking.
From time to time during the interview she hid her face in her hands as if to blot out the images that would be forever impressed in her memory.
It got dark, she said, and then the floors from above went down in grass.
It just kept falling and there was this horrible noise.
A horrible noise.
It was just after whatever happened, happened.
It was just a roar of the whole building crumbling.
Where I was sitting, it was the only place the floors didn't cave in.
I mean right over here, the floor was gone.
My little area where I was sitting, I was on the seventh floor and the eighth floor
came down and went through and then it just kept on going down.
There was a window to a hall by my desk and I crawled over it and got out.
The stairwell was still lit.
The light was on in the stairwell.
I know that some people are still in the building and that they haven't gotten to yet.
I saw a lot of people very badly hurt.
People were getting out covered with blood and just stunned.
I mean, it was just a shock.
As the news reporter, Conducting the interview, I was about to ask another question.
Ms.
Lawton turned suddenly pale and weak as new cries from the Muir building came rushing from behind her, frantic and emphatic.
Move back!
Let's go!
All companies, come out of the building right now!
Possibly explosives planted in the building.
Everybody, evac the federal building now!
Evacuate!
Get out now!"
In 1905, Oscar Wilde said in De Profundis, Suffering is one very long moment.
We cannot divide it by seasons.
We can record only its moods and chronicle their return.
The end of the world is near.
The end of the world is near.
The End of the World is Near The End of the World is Near
The End of the World is Near .
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I'm going to be talking about the news.
It was almost half past ten o'clock in the morning.
Thank you.
The warning came that another bomb had been discovered in the ruins of the Muir building.
This was the first of three times during the day that rescuers would be evacuated from the building because of the discovery of other explosive materials.
Witnesses monitoring the police scanner radios reported hearing the urgent announcement All companies come out of the building right now.
Everybody evacuate the federal building.
Remove all your personnel from the building immediately.
Possibly explosives planted in the building.
Repeat, evacuate the building immediately.
All personnel were ordered from the building and the surrounding area.
Some leaving victims trapped in the rubble who desperately cried after them to stay.
Oklahoma City Assistant Fire Chief John Hanson, in writing about the evacuation, stated, The decision to pull our people was made quickly.
In truth, there was no choice to make.
The first rule for those responding to an emergency is not to become victims themselves.
When the call came to evacuate, some of our people were working to extricate victims from the debris that trapped them.
We learned later that some of those rescuers opted to stay with the injured and ride out the threat.
We didn't reprimand any of them for their decision.
We felt it was one of those few times in life where there wasn't a right or wrong choice.
Whatever each rescuer personally chose to do, given each specific situation, was the right thing to do.
Rescue workers were forced to leave some people who were conscious but trapped.
Leaving was extremely tough on everyone who was sent out of the building, but it was obviously far worse for the victims left inside.
The rescuers who saw their faces caught glimpses of pure terror, and those expressions are something they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.
Firefighter Monty Baxter echoed Chief Hanson's words as he tried to explain how difficult it was for the rescuers to leave the victims.
I don't think anybody knows how tough that is, especially for a firefighter, to know that you're sitting here with somebody who's trapped and hurting and very frightened, and then you're ordered to leave.
Some of the trained individuals who had patients sitting right next to them refused to leave the area until those patients were removed, said medical technician Scott Moore.
It's real hard to sit there with someone who is bleeding and dying, who is looking at you and asking you not to leave.
And then just go ahead and leave them.
It's real hard to do that.
An unidentified firefighter, obviously deeply affected by what had occurred, stated, when we got back after the first evacuation, some of the people who were alive when we left them had died by the time we returned.
Deputy County Assessor Tim Gilbert had to abruptly end his search near the nursery when reports of a second bomb led to the evacuation of the area.
God, I hope they get those little kids out, he cried.
I had to leave little kids on the second floor.
I'd rather be horse-whipped than leave these little kids.
An ashen-faced volunteer, Robert Buckner, stated, I would have gladly given my life for one of those kids' lives, just one child.
Describing the sudden panic that struck those at the bomb site, paramedic Mark Robertson said, All of a sudden I looked up and I saw this large group of firemen running just as fast as they could.
A lot of them were older firemen, with whom I'd made many calls during the six years I'd been out in the field, and I saw fear on their faces.
Some of those guys were running faster than I'd ever seen them move in my life.
I thought, if these folks are scared about something, then it's time to run.
As word of the ordered evacuation spread, civilians in the area panicked and began to run away from the Federal building, fast as they could in every direction.
Everyone was moved back from the bomb site, while law enforcement officers made more secure the makeshift perimeter that had been hastily erected around the devastation.
More yellow crime scene tape went up, wooden barricades were brought in, and more guards were posted.
Demolition experts arrived to handle this newest emergency.
People all over the world, watching on television and listening on radio, were riveted to the spot as the Oklahoma Highway Patrol bomb squad entered the building.
All listened with bated breath for any information from the officers.
Moments after arriving, a bomb squad officer reported, All companies on the general alarm be advised there has been another device found in the federal building near a four-block area.
On the police band, a horrifying conversation between two workers in the federal building was overheard by scanner buffs who were following the downtown developments.
This conversation was reported by three separate and unrelated witnesses.
Quote, Boy, you're not going to believe this.
Believe what?
I can't believe it.
This is a military bomb.
End quote.
What was going on here?
No word had yet been released to the public concerning the makeup of the bomb or bombs that had devastated the building, but suddenly we were confronted by the voices of experts on the scene describing as a military bomb the device that was being handled at that moment by the bomb squad.
This was a very serious development.
It turned out to be something that would later be denied by all federal law enforcement representatives and by the primary local players when the media was finally allowed to ask the hard questions.
In fact, once the denials began, the subject of other explosives in the building became the issue that would simply be ignored by all officials for several months to come.
Witnesses at the scene had plenty to say about it at the time.
Mail carrier David Sykes, who had earlier escaped from the basement area of the Federal Building, reported that a firefighter ran toward the crowd gathered nearby and told him and his co-workers, You folks might want to move on west.
They found another bomb.
Kathy Garrett, the Red Cross Public Information Coordinator, told reporters, Everyone just started running.
They were shouting, Get out of the way!
There's a bomb!
I ran.
Andy Cullison, a cameraman who had been at the Good Printing Company seven blocks north of the Muir Building at the time of the explosions, had moved closer to the scene to observe the rescue operation.
As he was watching, a firefighter approached and warned him and others to evacuate the area.
Cullison said, The firefighter told him they believe there's a second device, and it's more powerful than the first.
Two firefighters and one other gentleman, each speaking independently of the others, and on condition of anonymity, testified to what was found in the building.
They all stated that the second bomb was actually several bombs.
This could account for the comments about a military bomb, because fulminate of mercury is a powerful explosive used primarily by the military.
clearly labeled, fulminate of mercury, with a hole in the top of each canister through
which a detonator was attached. This could account for the comments about a military
bomb, because fulminate of mercury is a powerful explosive used primarily by the military.
It is practically impossible to purchase this substance in any quantity at all. It is intensely
controlled by Federal regulations, and a person desiring to acquire fulminate of mercury must
first obtain approval and a Federal permit, and then jump through many hoops of bureaucratic
red tape.
Thank you.
Fulminative mercury is an extremely dangerous substance, is extremely difficult to obtain, and is not available to just anybody.
In an interview conducted in May 1995 by Relevance magazine, Oklahoma City Police Department Public Information Officer Bill Martin confirmed sketchy reports that several containers of fulminated mercury were discovered inside the building.
He guessed that they might have been used routinely by the BATF in their explosives work.
By late summer, 1995, Martin had changed his story, knew nothing about the fulminate of Mercury, couldn't imagine how the rumor got started, and suddenly could not recall the name of the magazine that had interviewed him the previous May.
The fact that this chemical was found in clearly labeled military canisters obviates the possibility that some local thug manufactured the chemical in his kitchen, if such a thing were even possible, or bought it on the The fact that there were multiple canisters of military origin found in the building casts an entirely different light on everything that happened thereafter.
Several witnesses at the scene watched as the rescue operation was stopped, and they stated that they saw at least three additional bombs taken out in barrels from the third floor by bomb squad personnel.
Others reported that explosive devices from the building were removed under blankets or medical stretchers.
It was later reported that these devices were taken to a county property and detonated.
Additionally, the Dallas Morning News later wrote, Early reports speculated that the terrorists may be traceable through the unexploded device agents recovered from the building.
When questioned about who might have been responsible for the bombing, Dr. Randall Heather, a terrorism expert, said, We should find out an awful lot when the bombs are taken apart.
I think it was a great stroke of luck.
And it's hard to talk about luck on a day like today in Oklahoma City.
But it was a great stroke of luck that we actually have got defused bombs.
It's through the bomb material that we'll be able to track down who committed this atrocity.
As far as the bomb squad, the police, the experts and the eyewitnesses were concerned there were secondary devices discovered and removed, possibly of military origin.
As far as the media was concerned, those discoveries were going to supply the big brick needed to track down the perpetrators.
The devices were not used to track down anyone.
Their existence was denied, concealed, and lied about by federal officials, and eyewitnesses were threatened and told to keep quiet.
No questions were asked.
Later, in what would possibly be the most inane statement made by any federal official on April 19th, Jack Killeran, then spokesman in Washington, D.C., for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said, Public safety personnel on the scene think they have found an unexploded device in the building.
We believe this was a bombing, and we are responding as if it was, but we do not have any forensic evidence yet to confirm that.
The damage, however, appears consistent with the bombing.
Kelleran's non-explanation was made in the afternoon, when all the world, except him, knew for certain that a bombing had indeed occurred.
It is interesting to note, however, that his unfortunate remarks were made prior to the unexplained transformation of the facts into what later became the official story.
Kellerin would never again refer publicly to secondary or unexploded devices, nor would he again appear in his role as BATF spokesman during the bombing investigation.
In spite of the testimony of numerous witnesses and reports from personnel on the scene, National news representatives would for months to come continue to say, the suspicious devices turned out not to be bombs.
This statement, and all others like it, were bold-faced lies.
No one in the mainstream press, with the possibility of public exposure and the power to inform, was asking any questions about these obvious contradictions.
For reasons unknown, all immediately adopted the revised version of the event, in whatever twisted configuration it had at the time, and have continued to do so through the story's many subsequent alterations.
But the fact remains that television viewers heard the screams, warning everyone to run from the scene.
We heard the voices crying, We saw the press scrambling to safety.
We saw medical personnel grasping the walking wounded under the arms and dragging them away from the area.
We listened to the reports from eyewitnesses who saw the secondary devices.
Something was definitely going on, and everyone who saw the bomb squad truck arriving at the scene and later observed the bomb squad removing devices from the building had no doubt that something had been discovered.
Nurse volunteer Tony Garrett spoke about the discovery of the secondary explosive devices.
There was a period when we were bringing the bodies to the playground, and that's when we were told that we needed to evacuate the building because they had found another bomb.
There were at least four other people who told me that there was a bomb inside the building.
And they were all part of the rescue effort.
Two of them actually saw the removal of the bombs when the bomb squad came down to the Mirror Building and described to me a timing device on one of the bombs.
It had been set to go off ten minutes after the earlier explosion.
We assumed that the mechanism of the bomb with the timer malfunctioned because of the first blast, so that's why the second bomb did not explode.
For what seemed like the longest hour in human history, we all waited in uncertainty, weeping
for the victims and praying for the injured and the rescuers, while the bomb squad brought
its equipment and personnel into the area to defuse and remove the secondary explosive
devices.
Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget to stay tuned later this evening to the worldwide
Freedom Radio Network for the Jackie Petrou Program, beginning at 6 Pacific, 7 Mountain,
8 Central and 9 Eastern, immediately followed by Michael Cottingham with Quest for Help.
Bye.
Or I should say, Quest for Help.
A little Freudian slip there.
You see, this is probably the most difficult material to read and maintain an emotional composure that I have ever read in my life.
And I must confess that a couple of times during this recitation I had tears streaming down my face.
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Make your check or money order payable to Harvest and send it to Harvest.
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Ladies and gentlemen, may God bless each and every single one of you.
and may God save this republic.
Thank you.
The End.
the the
you .
this is the voice of freedom the
This is The Voice of Freedom.
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I'm going to play a song for you.
At the end of the day, in a place that's divine.
My brother, in the winter, in the snow, with the world around, and your lips close to mine,
and your eyes so aglow, I shall be blessed, shall I be loved.
My dear brother, in the snow, and in the sand, you give me love, and they still seem to be the same.
For as long as we live, the human will be paid.
At the end of my I don't know.
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