Oklahoma man recalls bloddy, deadly blast
By Zach Taylor
Tribune-Star
On April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City lawyer Rand Eddy decided to renew his membership at the city's YMCA, which sat diagonally from the Alfred P. Murrah Building.
"Fortunately, I walked 30 feet into the building and wasn't standing near any windows," said Eddy, brother-in-law of Verity Jones of Terre Haute. "I had just handed them my credit card as the bomb went off.
"As I heard it, I looked to my left and saw the glass break and the doors literally just come flying off the hinges," he said. "At that point I basically went into a state of shock."
Eddy suffered bruises on his knees from being thrown to the floor by the explosion.
After he pulled himself from the floor, he became overwhelmed by panic.
"When the initial blast occurred, I didn't think it was over," he said. "I thought the building was coming down."
He said that following the explosion, the Murrah building rumbled as each floor blew up sequentially from bottom to top. The top floor then caved in and each floor under it followed, Eddy said.
His panic didn't begin to lessen until after he exited the YMCA.
"At that moment it was very surreal. I didn't think that my life was in danger any more. But as I got out it was like a scene from Vietnam," Eddy said. "There were numerous cars engulfed in black flames. There was tremendous fire blowing from the Murrah building.
"I still didn't realize how bad it was I was just concerned that the people in the street weren't injured because that was where most of the damage that I could see was," he said.
Eddy saw children carried from the YMCA building.
"Even though they weren't seriously injured, just to see little kids with blood on their faces and dazed looks," he said. "I started crying every time I tried to describe it to someone."
The Oklahoma City man is among those whose memories will resurface today on the sixth anniversary of the bombing that killed 168 and injured hundreds of others.
After the blast, Eddy said he approached a firefighter and asked to help, and his offer was declined. Eddy discovered his van could not be driven and started to walk from the area when he saw the brunt of the damage.
"As I walked south, I saw the back of the Murrah building and realized that the entire back was blown out," he said.
Jones, minister at Central Christian Church in Terre Haute, was working in a church in Connecticut at the time.
"Somebody came in and said 'Verity, there was an explosion in Oklahoma City,'" she said. "I didn't think much about it immediately."
When she went home, she saw television reports of the disaster.
"The panic set in. I just didn't know that my family was OK. Of course every phone line in Oklahoma City was jammed," she said. "It was about an hour of panic - real panic of not being able to confirm that they were OK."
When she finally contacted family members, Jones learned they were safe.
Back to Archived Stories Index