'...I could see sky, blue sky, clear through the building'
Greatest act of terrorism
Bomb left Oklahoma City in shambles
By Michele Holtkamp
Tribune-Star
It was a great spring morning, with crisp air and a beautiful sky spotted with fluffy white clouds. But Terry Rose was a bit irate.
City police had ticketed his car while he attended the Oklahoma City Mayor's Annual Prayer Breakfast. Frustrated, he tossed the ticket on his desk at an Oklahoma utility company and went on his first coffee break to relax.
He was filling his second cup when a violent tremor grabbed hold of the building, throwing Rose to the ground. When it settled, he ran from the building - dodging falling debris and stumbling through dense dust. A block north, smoke was beginning to rise up into the Oklahoma City sky.
Rose's first thought was of his mother, who worked on the third floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The smoke was billowing from the building - a building that Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb had blown to shreds at 9:01 a.m. on April 19, 1995. The bomb rattled most of downtown and could be felt miles away.
"I went to a plaza where mother's office was, and I could see sky, blue sky, clear through the building," Rose recalls with exact detail more than six years later. "And black smoke was billowing up, against this incredible blue sky."
McVeigh will be executed at 7 a.m. Monday at the U.S. Penitentiary, Terre Haute. It will be the first federal execution in 38 years.
"I thought I had made a terrible mistake," Rose said, thinking with horror that the natural gas boiler he'd been a part of getting for the Murrah building had exploded. And he had no clue where his mother was - or if she was dead or alive.
Inside the federal building, Dr. Paul Heath was convinced he was dead.
"When I was covered up and totally black, I remember thinking, God, I don't want to die like this," said Heath, a former counseling psychologist for the Department of Veteran Affairs.
He was at his desk shortly after 9 a.m. when three explosions erupted in his ears. His first thought was to get under his desk, but it was too late. He was buried to his armpits in bits and pieces of the building that had been workplace to hundreds of people.
He looked over his right shoulder to see the people and things that made up the Murrah building being sucked into a huge hole - many never to be seen again.
Heath clawed his way from the debris, then helped a few others out of the building. Rose, still waiting to hear if his mother was alive, helped a limping man find his wife. Those who hadn't been killed or buried in the bombing slowly stumbled onto the street, coughing and bleeding. With glass sticking from their flesh they wondered what happened.
Medical workers, investigators and police blared sirens into the morning air on their way downtown to begin the rescue effort. Meanwhile, street-side triage units cared for victims bused away from the scene.
Survivors and family members anxious to find their loved ones gathered on street corners. Rescue workers spent the next 16 days pulling bodies from the rubble. One hundred and sixty-eight went to their graves, including 19 children.
Oklahoma City was a disaster area.
Rose, whose mother survived and paged him from an apartment building next to a roadside medical unit, spent the afternoon calling apartment landlords asking them to get children off of school buses - children who wouldn't have parents coming home again.
Police searched for those responsible for the blast - today known as the most deadly act of terrorism on U.S. soil. They didn't know that one of the bombers had already been caught.
Approximately 80 miles north and about an hour after the bombing, an Oklahoma state trooper came upon a 1977 car driving north on the interstate with no license plate. Minutes later, the trooper arrested Timothy McVeigh on five gun- and weapon-related misdemeanors. McVeigh was carrying a loaded gun on him.
Normal judicial procedure called for McVeigh to be charged in court the day following his arrest. He would have posted a minor bail and been released. However, the judge in Noble County, Okla., was tied up on another case and McVeigh was held over until Friday.
But before his hearing, Federal Bureau of Investigations officials tied McVeigh to the bombing, and the trooper who arrested McVeigh recognized him from suspect sketches as the Oklahoma City bomber.
A jury handed McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, the death sentence in 1997 for building and delivering a 7,000-pound fuel and fertilizer bomb that killed eight federal agents in the Murrah building.
The Murrah building was later demolished. In its place, the Oklahoma City National Memorial Center stands, with outdoor memorials, a museum, and a special memorial for the Prevention of Terrorism. Clocks that stopped at 9:02 a.m., pencil sharpeners, and shoes ripped from the feet of victims retell the story in the museum.
Outside, a field of empty chairs pays tribute to the 168 killed.
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