Guest Author - Vance Rowe

When people went work at the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, they never realized that it would be their last day on earth. Nor did they know that their children would be killed when dropped off at the daycare center in the building. Timothy McVeigh knew this stuff though. He didn’t care. He was more concerned with “fighting the good fight”.

He thought that he was defending the Constitution when in reality he was just a terrorist. A terrorist that drove a large Ryder truck filled with chemicals. He parked the truck in front of the building, climbed out of the cab and walked up the street to a waiting getaway car. As he drove away in the car, he detonated the bomb in the truck that shook the city block. The Alfred P. Murrah building would never be the same. A third of the building was destroyed and one hundred sixty people were killed, including children in the daycare center.

One woman was buried under rubble for five hours and with a large slab of concrete on her, the only way she could be saved was to amputate her leg on the scene and the procedure had to be done without anesthesia. The woman, Dana Bradley, also lost her mother and two young children in the terrorist act. Dana was not the only one badly injured though. She was just one of approximately six hundred eighty people that were injured in the bombing.

Timothy McVeigh did not act alone either. He had an accomplice in Terry Nichols; a man he met in 1988 in Army Basic Training at Fort Benning, Georgia. They along with another roommate, Michael Fortier, did not like the way the government was being run and were vehemently against gun control. McVeigh had had enough after the government’s involvement with the incident at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and the attack on the Waco compound of the Branch Davidian religious cult. As a matter of fact, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building was timed to go off on the second year anniversary of the Waco siege.

In a twist of irony, ninety minutes after the explosion, Timothy McVeigh was stopped by Oklahoma State troopers on Interstate 35 for driving a vehicle with no license plates and was arrested for illegally carrying a weapon. Within days of the bombing, forensic evidence pointed to McVeigh and Nichols as the terrorists and Michael Fortier as an accomplice. Fortier did not have an active part in the bombing but he knew of it and failed to warn the U.S. Government of the impending attack. Fortier was given twelve years in prison and his wife was given immunity for her testimony. On June 11, 1997, Timothy was put to death by lethal injection for his conviction. Terry Nichols, the co-conspirator, was sentenced to 161 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.