Never shall I forget I forget the opening statement of federal prosecutor Joseph Hartzler, who took McVeigh’s twisted view of “tyranny” and turned it on its head. Never shall I forget the sorrow of Helena Garrett, a mother whose 16-month-old son, Tevin, was murdered by racist hate and whose testimony left virtually everyone inside the courtroom in tears. I covered the entirety of the Oklahoma City bombing and sat in on both federal trials in Denver. Even as we prayed for survivors the stories of the dead swallowed us in grief. Even as the toll of dead and injured mounted in downtown Oklahoma city doctors and nurses strained to help. Even as fires raged inside the Murrah building 25 years ago first responders rushed in to try to rescue innocent victims. So many of the heroes of 1995 are our heroes today. It is sadly fitting that we should observe during a deadly pandemic the 25th anniversary of what was until the 9/11 the deadliest terrorist attack in American history. He shares prison space with other terrorists, men like Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” and Ramzi Youssef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
Brandy lingon ok city bombing trial#
After apologizing to his victims at the end of his state trial in 2004, after finally expressing remorse, Nichols today is serving out a federal life sentence at the “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado. Neither the federal jury in Denver nor a state jury in Oklahoma was willing to sentence him to death. Nichols, who just turned 65 years old, is still alive. He died with his eyes open, staring into the closed-circuit camera of the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, set up to show his death by lethal injection to bombing survivors back in Oklahoma. McVeigh was sentenced to death in 1997 and executed on June 11, 2001, after waiving federal appeals that would have kept him alive for years longer. Nichols, the junior partner in the plot, was arrested in nearby Kansas. McVeigh, an Army veteran, was caught speeding away from the scene of the crime. All the more reason why we should not forget the act of war these home-grown extremists waged against the American people or what their continuing assaults mean for American law and politics. The right-wing extremist movement that emerged during the Obama administration is with us today, egged on by a president who has repeatedly enabled white supremacist policies. The militia movement after McVeigh’s blast largely faded into the background until the next Democratic president took office. Enraged by the siege at Waco in April 1993, they hoped that an act of domestic terrorism would spawn some sort of armed revolution - much like the 9/11 terrorists who thought that taking down the World Center would lead to war. The right-wing extremists who embraced and nurtured McVeigh and Nichols, and who in turn were inspired by them, had risen up during the Clinton presidency. The Oklahoma City bombing and the resulting criminal trials represented the height (or the nadir if you will) of the militia movement of the 1990s. The anti-government, racist zealots murdered 168 people, including 19 children, on the morning of April 19, 1995, when they blew up a yellow Ryder rental truck filled with homemade explosives McVeigh had parked directly below a day-care center in the building.
Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. It’s been exactly 25 years since Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and likely “others unknown” conspired to blow up the Alfred P.
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