I’ll never forget seeing this on the television. I was getting ready for work and had to be there at 10 a.m. I had just tuned into Regis and Kathie Lee. And then the newscaster broke into the show. On the morning of April 19, 1995, the image shot across the screen of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The whole front side was missing.
We didn’t know it at that moment, but an ex-Army soldier and security guard named Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck in front of that building and blew it to bits. A mass murder, in just minutes.
Inside his vehicle was a powerful bomb. He had constructed the thing out of a terrible mix of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and a few other chemicals. He got out, shut, and locked his door, and walked to his getaway car. He started the timed fuses.
Then, at exactly 9:02 a.m., the bomb exploded.
It looked like some kind of a war zone. The front third of the building had been blown away. Dozens of nearby cars were destroyed. In addition, more than 300 other buildings were damaged or destroyed by the blast.
But that wasn’t all. Horribly, 168 people were killed. Several hundred more were injured. And that was the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history.
The media assumed that the attack was the handiwork of Middle Eastern terrorists. Just two years before another bombing had occurred at the World Trade Center.
The FBI, however, began looking for hard evidence at the crime scene. It didn’t take long for them to find it.
It was a piece of the vehicle that did the trick. The rear axle of the Ryder truck that McVeigh used, was located. That brought a vehicle identification number that was traced to a body shop in Junction City, Kansas. And of course, that took them to the man who had rented the van. Tim McVeigh.
Today, June 11, 2001, marks the anniversary of the day that the horrific McVeigh was executed by lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute. He ate Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream before he died and seemed happy.
The FBI discovered a lot about McVeigh’s extremist ideologies. He had the uttermost hatred for the United States government. He was angered over the events at Waco, Texas, two years earlier.
McVeigh didn’t work alone. The FBI discovered that a friend of McVeigh’s named Terry Nichols helped build the bomb. Nichols was sentenced to 161 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Right now, he is sitting in a prison called the ADX Florence, a super maximum-security prison near Florence, Colorado. He is 67 years old. He’s got some time left to serve.
The bombing was quickly solved, but the investigation turned out to be one of the most exhaustive in FBI history. By the time they finished, the Bureau had conducted more than 28,000 interviews. Incredibly, they followed some 43,000 investigative leads. And the next part is mind-blowing. They amassed three-and-a-half tons of evidence and reviewed nearly a billion pieces of information.
Our history holds many dark turns. Most of them, maybe even all of them, involve hatred, in some form or another. I have a hard time understanding this mindset. Because no matter how upset I’ve been over certain incidents in my own life, I’ve never wished to harm another person.
It is beyond my scope to comprehend this way of thinking. I’m telling you. On the rare occasion that I kill a bug? I apologize first, for the error of my ways.
As such, I don’t have any solutions, other than for the rest of us — the people with goodness in their hearts — to strengthen that virtue, and continue its power, by sharing it every chance we get.
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Goodness is about character – integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.
— Dennis Prager
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True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.
— Albert Einstein
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The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.
— Dalai Lama
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