'I Thought I Was Going To Die'

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By Andrew Murr

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The wait was finally over. Last week Timothy McVeigh at last abandoned his final appeals, dismissed his lawyers and resigned himself to the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Ind. To many Americans, McVeigh's execution is the last act in a long, bitter drama. But for many in Oklahoma City, the anguish of April 19, 1995, will never recede. Paul Heath was working in room 522 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building when McVeigh's devastating bomb ripped through nine stories of steel and concrete. "I thought, 'God, I don't want to die like this'," he remembers. Heath made it out alive; 168 men, women and children did not. Survivors and the families of those killed are still living through the aftershocks of the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in our history--battling addiction, finding faith, coping with loss. On the eve of McVeigh's scheduled execution, eight survivors shared their stories with NEWSWEEK. Together, their voices provide a harrowing timeline of that terrible day--and of a tragedy's echoes. Here are their stories.

The Doctor Carl Spengler A third-year resident in emergency medicine, Spengler was just blocks from the Murrah building on the morning of the bombing. We went to breakfast, and we were just sitting there talking, and all of a sudden it felt like the building about got knocked over. A man, seconds after the bomb went off, opened the door and said, "I think the Federal Building just collapsed." So I got up, and by the time I got to the door, debris was landing in the street. So we drove four, five, six blocks, but we couldn't go any farther because there was so much debris in the street. I was standing looking at half this building gone, and I kept thinking I was going to see hundreds of people in the building screaming and hollering. Except for one car alarm going off, and the fire burning in the parking lot next to it, you could hear the birds singing. It was absolutely that quiet. The CopDon HullHe has spent 14 years as a hostage negotiator with the Oklahoma City Police Department. But on the morning of the Murrah bombing, Hull found himself performing an entirely different task: trying to find life amid the rubble. You'd be going along, and then you'd see a body part kind of sticking out of a pile of stuff. You'd dig that person out. They weren't alive. You'd feel this dripping, like water was dripping on you, but it wasn't water. My worst nightmare to this day: my daughter was 3 at the time, and I remember going through the rubble and I found a hand. Just a hand. And it was--it fit in the palm of my hand. And I dug and I dug, because I had to find the rest that went with this hand. I never did. But that bothered me more than anything. Because that hand was the exact same size as my daughter's. The New MotherAmy PettyTim McVeigh's bomb buried the 28-year-old federal-credit-union employee under tons of rubble. Her brush with death convinced her, after 12 years of marriage, to have a child. But Petty is still plagued by feelings of survivor's guilt. I think the very most difficult part was returning to work. When you lose that much staff, there's people who don't know what's going on, that kind of thing. You know, sitting around in a staff meeting and looking at all these people and thinking, "Who are you? You aren't supposed to be here." Kind of almost resentment... [of] the new people, the new hires. You want the old people back. I'm now vice president of operations. It's kind of bittersweet. Because every time I get a promotion I think, "So-and-so would have been in line for this next." That's kind of hard to take sometimes.

While I was trapped that six and a half hours I honestly thought I was going to die. What made me decide to have a child was those moments thinking, "This is it. I'm dying." And those little regrets that you regretted in life. I thought, "Gosh, I never had any children. I never experienced that part [of life]." Didn't even know I wanted to until I thought this was it. The Jane DoeSusan Waltonremembers almost nothing about the explosion that ripped through the Murrah building. But she has had 26 surgeries and years of physical therapy to remind her. Since then she has defied pessimism, going from wheelchair to crutches to a cane.

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When they loaded me into the ambulance, they took my purse away from me. It was not returned to my family until a day or two later. So I was a Jane Doe at that time. The one small memory I have of that day was of lying on my back, looking up at the ceiling with the fluorescent lighting. Every now and then somebody would say, "I'm sorry, sweetheart, I don't understand what you're trying to say." Well, from studying interpreting, I had learned to finger-spell. At one point they thought I was flailing around because I had had surgery that day, and they restrained my arm. Then, finally, they figured out that I was signing, and they had an interpreter come in. I gave them my name and my mother's phone number. So I always tease that no matter how big we get, when we're hurt, we want our mamas.

I didn't have any insurance at the time, so basically most of my care has been given through donations. The doctors--a lot of them--have donated their services. They fixed our house up for us. A lot of times you send your money and you don't know where it's going, but they built on a handicapped bathroom for me. Basically anything I've needed has been provided for me. The WoundedAnn BanksA few days before the bombing, Banks, a HUD employee working in the Murrah building, had such "an eerie feeling" something was going to happen that she broke into tears. When it did, "this blast, this force from hell,'' in Banks's words, knocked her to her desk. Only her high-back chair spared her from being decapitated, and her wig--"my helmet of protection''--limited the cuts to her head. Still, the experience left Banks, 61, with other wounds that haven't healed so easily.

My son lives in Atlanta, and he sent me a package on Mother's Day [1997]. It was delivered by Federal Express. The man rang the doorbell and told me he had this package for me. I told him I couldn't take it. My thinking was, it may be a bomb. I told the man, "Just set it down in the middle of the front yard, and I will sign for it. But I can't take the package." My son called to see if I had received his gift. I told him, "Yes, I sure did, and it's sitting in the middle of the front yard." And he coached me: "Mother, it's from me. Just look at the package. What does it say? Does it say it's from your son?" I said, "Yes, it does." "Is your name on the front of it?" I said, "Yes, it is." He said, "Well, just pick it up." I did. I said, "I'll go in and get some scissors and I'll come back out and I'll take the paper wrapping off of it." That's what I did. I opened it outside and saw that he had sent me a beautiful little jogging set for Mother's Day. The JournalistDon Ferrellwas a retired "country-newspaper editor'' until his 37-year-old daughter, Susan, an attorney for HUD, was killed in the bombing. Ferrell now serves as chairman of the board of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism.

My wife and I were in Ft. Worth, getting dressed to go spend the day around town, and we had CNN on. Something came on about an Oklahoma City bombing... We were just kind of mildly curious. Then they cut in with a picture of the front of the building, with cars on fire and the building just totally destroyed. We were going to stay in the hotel room until we saw that picture. We threw our bags in the car and drove up here as fast as we could. Later that evening we went out to First Christian Church up on 36th and Walker. By that time they had pulled in teams of clergymen and undertakers, and they were asking people to bring in identifying things--dental records, photographs, whatever they could. They called us Saturday afternoon, and they had it pretty well worked out by then. We came to church. It was a private entrance, and they took us to a room and told us that they'd found our daughter.

You never think you're going to lose a child. I figured they'd bury me. But trying to take care of her business affairs, close things up, just trying to find car keys. Her car was in the underground garage. We never found her keys until months later. It was in the archives' temporary office, and just getting things sorted out, her mortgage payments and stuff, there were a lot of things you never think you'll do. The Disaster CoachJohn Clarkwas a police lieutenant assigned to the bombing perimeter. He later became the emergency-services manager for the city, and has delivered hundreds of speeches and lectures to law-enforcement and emergency-preparedness groups around the country. He can rattle off the grim statistics of the bombing with ease, but even so, tiny details sometimes trigger an emotional reaction. There's some things I can talk about and some things I can't. I'll be up doing the same thing, talking about the same things, giving the same information, and I will think about something that has been buried back here. And for some reason--it's happened to me probably four, five different times across the country--I just stop. And it just overwhelms me. It happened to me up in Pocatello, Idaho, in front of about 150 people. I went up there with another officer. Mickey Monronie, who was with the Secret Service, was a friend of mine, and was killed in that bombing. The guy I went up there with did not even tell me he was gonna do this, but before we left, it was Mickey's birthday, and his daughter had written a deal and put it in the paper in the obituary column, and Bo got up and read that, and it just cratered me. The ActivistBud WelchThe Murrah bombing took the life of his only daughter, 23-year-old Julie Marie Welch, a Spanish translator for the Social Security Administration. Afterward, anger and drinking consumed him--until he became a fervent anti-death-penalty activist.

I had always been opposed to the death penalty. I had often been warned by friends or acquaintances over a cup of coffee--discussing the death penalty prior to Julie's death--that if it ever happened to me, I'd change my mind. And I indeed did change my mind immediately after the bombing. I was so full of vengeance and rage that I didn't even want trials for Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols once they had been arrested and charged. I simply wanted them fried. I look back on that now and recognize that that was a period of temporary insanity, but it's a very normal thing for victims' family members to go through.

I still struggled with the death-penalty issue after I accepted the fact that we had to have trials. I struggled with it for another eight or nine months beyond that--through bad tobacco abuse, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, and alcohol abuse at night. After I closed my Texaco station, I'd be home and within 10 minutes I had my first drink made. If I drank enough when I went to bed, I could go to sleep... I was hung over all day long. I went to the bomb site, of course, every day after Julie's death.

I remember standing there at the end of January [1996]. It was kind of a cold afternoon. It was about 3 o'clock. My head was hurting, and I was watching people walking the chain-link fence [memorial]. I was standing underneath the survivor tree. And I knew I was sick, and I knew I had to do something different. So I went to asking myself the question over the next three weeks, many times a day: what does Bud Welch need to be able to get beyond this? I was able to recognize that the day that we kill Tim McVeigh would be vengeance, an act of hate. The only reason that Julie and 167 others were dead was because of vengeance and hate.

After I got through that struggle of heavy drinking, then I was able to start remembering things that I had suppressed shortly after the bombing. One incident was seeing Bill McVeigh on television a couple, three weeks after. At one point he looked into the lens of the television camera, and when he did I could see a deep pain in his eye. When I saw that, I recognized his pain immediately, because I was living that same pain.

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