Priscilla Salyers has moved on from fateful day
By Howard Greninger
Tribune-Star
A sonic boom reverberates through Priscilla Salyers' mind.
The noise was familiar to her while living on a naval air station near Dallas as a young girl.
Salyers thought she heard that unmistakable bang once again in Oklahoma City on the morning of April 19, 1995.
Just moments before, fellow U.S. Customs agent Paul Ice had leaned over her desk on the fifth floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to ask her a question.
"It was a very loud noise. Paul and I locked eyes, but there was not enough time to think" about what had happened, Salyers said. "His eyes were the last thing I saw."
In that moment, Salyers was plunged three stories into the destruction of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Ice, 42, along with fellow Customs agent Claude Medearis, 41, died. Somehow, Salyers lived.
For the next 412 hours, Salyers would lay face down, surrounded by gnarled metal, insulation and concrete. It was silent. The rubble blocked the sound of sirens and fire trucks.
"I never knew I fell. It was almost like somebody was pushing on my back trying to push me down. I kept fighting it, trying to sit up. I actually thought I was sitting at my desk that the overhead [cabinets] had fallen on top of me." she said.
She was found in what was to be called the "pit" area of the building, near the America's Kids day-care center, where more than a dozen children died.
"Before they found me, I heard someone say this is the child-care center, we have a lot of children in here. I heard someone respond saying, 'We know. We are trying to get you out,'" Salyers said. "It wasn't making sense, because they are on the second floor and I am on the fifth."
She didn't realize the upper floors had collapsed. Salyers tried to dig herself out of the debris, but she couldn't get free.
At one point, she felt what she thought was a rock pressing against her stomach. "When I reached underneath me to pull this rock out, I realized it was a hand," she said.
"I do not know if it was my co-worker, because I was told there were about seven people under me who were dead," Salyers said. "I knew the hand was not responding. I guess shock and everything, I wasn't even thinking about that person being dead. It never even occurred to me."
Salyers, then 44, suffered a broken rib and punctured lung. She spent five days in a hospital but has no physical scars.
Now, at 50, Salyers said her life has moved forward from that fateful day. She works as an investigative assistant for the U.S. Secret Service.
Her story became a movie, "Oklahoma City: A Survivor's Story," which first aired on the Lifetime network in 1998.
The man convicted of the bombing, Timothy McVeigh, has claimed he never went inside the Murrah Building. But Salyers said she feels sure she met McVeigh shortly before Christmas in 1994.
A man who looked like McVeigh came into her office and asked for a job, she said. "I stepped into the entranceway, handed this man pamphlets and talked to him for a little while," she said.
"It was just the facial features and mannerisms, the body language, the way he moved. It never came out as evidence," Salyers said, because she did not have exact dates and times of when the man came into the office.
Salyers said she supports the death penalty, and will watch McVeigh's execution via closed circuit TV in Oklahoma.
"I feel that there are going to be some people who will feel a sense of healing once he is dead. There are people like me, that it will not matter. We are already moving forward in our lives. We are not going to allow him to control us," Salyers said.
"I believe I might feel a sense of relief for those 168 chairs that are empty; justice will be served for those people who died," she said.
Salyers, along with her husband, Roy, have raised two sons, Jason, 26, and Josh, 21.
"I brought my boys up to know that you are allowed to make choices, but you pay the consequences of your choices," Salyers said. "I feel Tim McVeigh is paying the consequence."
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