Thirty years ago, a truck bomb went off at a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children, in the deadliest domestic terror attack in the U.S.
“In Oklahoma, they’re used to twisters, those ugly storms that arrive across the prairie to savage the towns, tear them apart and leave, tossing houses behind them,” TIME wrote in a special issue after the April 19, 1995 bombing. “To live there means understanding that nature is not evil, only whimsical. Human nature, on the other hand, proved incomprehensible at 9:02 Wednesday morning.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The perpetrator was Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government ex-Army soldier who served in first Gulf War, who received the death penalty and was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.
Three decades later, the documentary Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror looks back on that day, featuring interviews with law enforcement involved in the case and victims of the attack. Viewers will also hear McVeigh’s voice throughout the documentary, sourced from snippets of nearly 60 hours of interviews the journalist Lou Michel conducted with McVeigh while he was in a federal prison in Colorado.
How Timothy McVeigh got caught
In the documentary, people who processed McVeigh in the criminal justice system, like the jailer who took his fingerprints, and the highway patrolman who pulled over McVeigh in an unrelated traffic stop about an hour after the bombing, talk about the moments that led to McVeigh’s arrest. The officer who pulled him over on the highway, Charlie Hanger, remembers McVeigh telling him that he had a loaded weapon, to which he responded, “so is mine.” Because McVeigh had a loaded weapon and was driving without license plates, he was taken into custody.
While McVeigh was in custody, the FBI was compiling evidence that connected him to the scene, including a piece of the truck that blew up the building. It had a number on it that allowed police to trace the vehicle to Elliott’s auto body shop in Junction City, Kansas. People who had seen him at the auto body shop worked with sketch artists to produce sketches that FBI agents took door-to-door in the city. A hotel owner said the sketch reminded him of a customer named Timothy McVeigh who had recently checked into the hotel. Authorities were able to search the name in a database of people recently arrested and raced to the Noble County courthouse in Perry, Oklahoma, where McVeigh was standing in front of a judge.
McVeigh was part of a fringe movement of American extremists who were incensed by a botched FBI raid in Waco, Texas, that left 76 dead on April 19, 1993. Carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing on the same date two years later was an act of revenge on the federal government. “Waco started this war. Hopefully Oklahoma would end it,” McVeigh told Michel from prison.
McVeigh was one of many extremists inspired by The Turner Diaries, a book in which the main character blows up the FBI headquarters with a truck carrying similar explosives to the ones that McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing. He worked with Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who had served in the Army with McVeigh, to pull off the plot. Nichols, who helped McVeigh build the bomb, is in prison for life, without the possibility of parole. Fortier, who was aware of the plot, accepted a plea deal in exchange for testifying in McVeigh’s trial, and was released in 2006.
Excerpts of Michel’s interviews with McVeigh reveal a man who is still bitter from enduring bullying as a young child. “Because I was so short, nobody used to pick me for the teams,” McVeigh explains. “They started calling me Noodle McVeigh because I was thin as a noodle.” Michel says in the documentary, “Guns made him feel secure.”
McVeigh told Michel he had no regrets about the bombing: “Am I remorseful? No.”
How the bombing continues to impact survivors
The documentary features devastating accounts from survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Amy Downs, who worked in the federal office building, was buried alive. “I was still in my chair upside down buried in about 10 feet of rubble,” she recalls.
She remembers her right hand sticking out of the debris, a rescuer trying to determine whether she was alive by asking what color shirt she was wearing, and when she said green, a hand grabbed her hand.
Downs later became CEO of the credit union she was working for at the time of the bombing.
A six-month-old baby, Antonio Cooper, was one of the 168 people killed that day, in a daycare center located at the site of the bombing. His mother, Renee Moore, worked in downtown Oklahoma City and would see him everyday at lunch. The day of the bombing was the first time she didn’t get to go see him. That night, while rescuers were continuing to search for survivors, it was very cold and rainy, and she recalls thinking, “Lord please don’t let my baby be in that building cold and hungry and hurt. It was the worst night ever.”
Moore still lives in Oklahoma City and had another son, Carlos Jr. She says in the documentary that McVeigh got off easy by being executed under the death penalty in 2001, that he deserved to suffer for longer in prison. “He’s taking the easy road out,” she says. “We have to live with this; he doesn’t.”
