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Collateral Damage: McVeigh, the Children, and the Ideology He Wore on His Chest
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Timothy McVeigh knew the daycare was there — and called nineteen children collateral damage in a war he'd already decided he was fighting. This chapter of the Oklahoma City bombing story recovers what the statistics buried: the second floor, the survivors, and the extremist network that made it possible.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people think they know this story. A truck bomb.
Let's set the scene clearly. The Murrah building was a nine-story federal complex in downtown Oklahoma City.
Timothy McVeigh was twenty-six years old when he drove that truck. He was a Gulf War veteran, a decorated soldier, and a man who had spent the years after the military traveling gun shows and consuming anti-government literature.
McVeigh didn't operate in isolation, even though the investigation sometimes framed it that way. He and Nichols had connections to Elohim City, a white separatist compound on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border.
Now the part that gets overlooked. Fifteen of the nineteen children who died that morning were in the daycare center.
The youngest survivor in the daycare was a girl named PJ Allen. She was eighteen months old.
McVeigh was arrested the same day as the bombing, pulled over for a missing license plate ninety minutes after the explosion. He was tried in nineteen ninety-seven and sentenced to death.
The Oklahoma City bombing remained the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history until September eleventh, two thousand and one. After nine-eleven, it was somewhat eclipsed in the national memory, reclassified from the worst thing we could imagine to a kind of prelude.
Here's what tends to happen to events like this in public memory. The ideology gets analyzed.
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