![]() ![]() I was shocked to think that someone could do that to small children,” he said. Children’s bodies were mangled and decapitated.” “I was in Vietnam,” he said, “and I never thought I would see something like that again. ![]() Her colleague, Bobby Johnson, 42 years old and the father of a 20-day-old son, had seen it before, but Wednesday’s carnage still brought him to tears. She couldn’t take it.”Īnother nurse, Christine Johns, said: “Babies were wrapped around poles. One doctor who was with us picked up a group picture of the children and burst into tears. Their school papers and toys were strewn on the floor. Keesling said she “saw decapitated bodies. Earlier, some of them had searched for victims in the devastated day-care center at the building’s west end.Īsked what it was like, nurse Rena Keesling, 28, pointed to a pile of bricks on the street and said, “like that.” In the parking garage beneath the damaged building, a temporary morgue had been set up, and emergency medical technicians waited there for more bodies to be pulled from the rubble. Inside, rescuers tried to cover the bodies of the dead children with blankets, but the wind, pushing through the vacant spaces where walls and windows once had been, kept blowing them off. Rescue workers led her away just before they brought out a dead boy they believed was her son. Another woman who survived the blast stood outside the building, screaming for her child. Her husband and two daughters, ages 3 and 4, were among the missing. ![]() Murrah Federal Building at midday, a young mother, her head swathed in bandages, sat weeping. On the sidewalk outside the devastated Alfred P. One of the children known to have survived was in surgery Wednesday evening and the other was in an intensive-care facility. Some of them were burned beyond recognition. The dead ranged in age from 1 to 7 years old. Of the approximately 40 children thought to have been in the building when the bomb went off, at least 12 are dead and about 26 were listed as missing late Wednesday night. I’m glad we were able to see it, even if we did happen by it on accident.The car bomb that destroyed a nine-story federal office building here Wednesday exploded directly under a day-care center on the structure’s second floor and badly damaged another baby-sitting facility in a nearby YMCA. It is an incredibly beautiful, if somber, place. There are smaller chairs to denote the children who perished.Īt the center of the memorial is a large reflecting pool, and it is flanked my tall pillars at either side, denoting the time of the “last moments of peace” (9:01) and the time when “recovery began” (9:03). Each chair is engraved with the name of someone who died in the bombing. Precisely where the building had once stood are nine rows of metal chairs – a row for each floor of the building. It is engraved with the names of the more than 600 survivors of the attack. Most died not from the blast itself, but from when the building collapsed.Īt the north and east end of the memorial are pieces of salvaged granite from the original building, which comprise the Survivors’ Wall. 168 people died in the attack, including 19 children who were at a daycare located inside of the building. On April 19, 1995, the federal building that stood on this spot was bombed, in what became the deadliest act of domestic terrorism to have occurred on U.S. We’d hoped to make a pilgrimage there but had accepted that we wouldn’t have time, and then there it was: unavoidable. We were walking back to our hotel on our last day in town, and we passed it, quiet and looming in its spot adjacent to the main road on which we walked. We found ourselves at the Oklahoma City National Memorial by accident. ![]()
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