Oklahoma Bombing: Toll Keeps Climbing

He took off fast and recklessly, climbing up into the Oklahoma sky and out past the downtown skyline where once stood the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

From the ground came desperate radio calls ordering him back, but Laurence Martin pushed upward, piloting the plane over a tiny church he had attended in northwest Oklahoma City.

Martin banked the plane and then, alone with his thoughts, the former Army captain, one of the lucky ones to make it out of the Murrah building, pointed the nose toward a small field near the church. The single-engine Cessna fell to the earth.

He was only the latest casualty.

Four years after the worst act of terrorism in the United States, at least half a dozen people closely linked to the Oklahoma City bombing have taken their own lives.

The others were two rescue workers, a federal prosecutor, a bomb-blast survivor and the husband of one of the victims. At least twice as many have attempted suicide; many more have dreamed it.

Despite the best efforts of counselors to residents of this capital city, the emotional pain caused by the events of April 19, 1995, still has not washed away. In addition to the 168 who died when a Ryder truck bomb exploded in front of the Murrah at 9:02 a.m., more than 500 were injured.

Many survivors--building workers, paramedics, police officers--were haunted by the guilt that they had lived while others died--people they were unable to save. The resulting psychological wreckage is everywhere: spousal abuse, failed marriages, ruined careers, school problems, nightmares, drug and alcohol dependence.

Some now spend their days on a bar stool. One police officer was fired for writing himself prescription drugs, another became addicted to gambling. A woman saved by rescuers is today so frightened that she keeps a stick in her car, and a gun in her purse.

Professionals trained and experienced in the horrible business of mass killings know to expect such plagues. Within days of the bombing, trauma experts began warning that the suffering would likely reach its peak in three to five years--long after the national outpouring of sympathy had stopped and left residents alone in their anguish.

Those years have now arrived.

In a world increasingly bedeviled by senseless violence and unexpected carnage, disaster experts are learning more about the post-traumatic stress disorders suffered by those left behind. A single death can have open-ended consequences for surviving family members, they say, but a death multiplied by 168 will devastate a community.

Similar scenes have played out in other disasters: the 1988 explosion of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland; the 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center; the 1996 midair explosion, still unresolved, of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island.

The long healing process has just begun in Littleton, Colo., where two students at Columbine High School last week went on a shooting and bomb-throwing rampage, killing 13 before turning their guns on themselves.

After meeting with counselors, rescue workers and others, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno alluded to the grieving process, telling reporters: “This is not something that is dealt with in a day or a week or a month. This, as we have learned from Oklahoma City and other tragedies, is something that must be dealt with over time, and we are in this for the long haul.”

But nothing approaches the “titanic human disaster” of the Oklahoma City bombing, according to Dr. Ray V. McIntyre, editor in chief of the Journal of the Oklahoma State Medical Assn.

The carnage occurred in the heart of the same community where the victims and survivors lived and worked together. An entire region in the middle of the country, which once thought itself immune from political terrorism, lost its sense of safety.

“I don’t think any of us,” said police chaplain Jack Poe, “really had any idea of the emotional impact that this was going to have.”

Even as the concrete is being poured for a new national memorial and museum on the scorched ground that once held the Murrah building, other reminders of that awful day will not give way.

Many relived the trauma during the 1997 federal trials in Denver of bomb conspirators Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols. Now another trial is expected in Oklahoma, with state charges filed against Nichols who, unlike McVeigh, was not sentenced to death in Denver.

Diane Leonard, whose husband, Don, a Secret Service agent, was killed in the bombing, testified at the two Denver trials; she now runs a counseling program for rescue workers, including those who came here from Southern California.

When she goes home, she worries about one of Don’s adult sons, her stepson, who she said tried to kill himself three times during the first Nichols trial.

Mike Lenz, whose wife, Carrie, was killed in the bombing, broke down as he testified at McVeigh’s trial about his own near-suicide. “There is nothing, nothing, more dangerous than a man who has no reason to live,” he said.

Nationally, the suicide rate has remained roughly the same for decades: about 11 deaths per 100,000 people per year. But recently suicide replaced AIDS as the eighth-leading cause of death in the country, and U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher called suicide a “serious public health problem.”

Indeed, it is the suicides and the near-suicides that, more than anything else, reveal the anguish that permeates almost everything here.

Kathleen Silovsky had been one of the lucky ones. Had she been at her desk in the U.S. Housing and Urban Development office when the bomb went off, she almost surely would have been killed. She survived because she was taking a break in a nearby room.

“She once had the most beautiful smile, like she loved life,” said her friend and former co-worker Sharilee Lyons, who moved to Cleveland to get away from the constant reminders of her many co-workers killed in the blast.

After the bombing, “you could tell her smiles were not really real,” Lyons said of Silovsky. “She was just too depressed.”

Silovsky, a wife and mother of two, was 57 years old last year when she died after an apparent drug overdose around the time of the third anniversary of the bombing.

Another bombing-related suicide victim was Ted Richardson. He was an assistant prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office, which helped put the case together against McVeigh and Nichols. Two Augusts ago he shot himself.

His body was found one dawn in a car parked at a church where bomb survivors and relatives often met. He was wearing a T-shirt honoring the unknown hundreds who came to the aid of victims: “Nameless Saints,” it said, “We Give Our Thanks.”

Richardson was 49. He shot himself in the chest, a single shotgun blast that tore a hole through that T-shirt.

“I talked to him the Friday before that happened,” recalled Jane Thomas, the memorial curator. She said Richardson was helping her collect materials from the federal trials. Her voice broke. “We were just thunderstruck . . . “

Police Sgt. Terrance Yeakey was one of the first rescue workers to reach the Murrah building after the blast. Writing for a book of remembrances titled “We Will Never Forget,” he later recalled the horrific images of that day, particularly a victim he knew only as Randy.

“All we could see was part of his face. He was completely buried,” Yeakey recalled. “We couldn’t tell where his arms or legs were. We began lifting blocks of concrete off of Randy. He would tell us it hurt as we lifted the chunks one by one. I lifted a board off his face and part of his face peeled back.

“Finally, we freed Randy and started to carry him out. Suddenly, the ground I was walking on gave way and I fell in a hole,” Yeakey wrote.

But the role of hero did not fit him well. Yeakey became moody; the job was no longer the same, and there were problems in his marriage. Within a year of the bombing, he was deeply troubled.

“I tried to help Yeakey,” remembered Poe, the police chaplain. “We had some of the officers over on Christmas Day for breakfast. I can see him at our table even now, eating and joking, and he was personality-plus. That’s what we still can’t believe.”

Another friend, Romona McDonald, said Yeakey wrote her about his misgivings.

“I think my days as a police officer are numbered,” the letter said. “I think there is [sic] a lot of secrets floating around now about my mental state of mind. I believe that a lot of the problems the officers are having right now are because some of them know what really happened and can’t deal with it.”

Just after the first anniversary of the bombing, the 30-year-old Yeakey was found in a field in El Reno, Okla., where Nichols and McVeigh were then being held at a federal penitentiary. He had slit his wrists and neck, then shot himself in the head; he had placed the gun barrel snug against his right temple, the state medical examiner determined.

“I don’t care what Terry would tell you,” said his friend, McDonald, “he was a hero.”

She sometimes visits the El Reno cemetery where he now lies beside his mother. Inscribed on his gravestone are the words, “Loved By Many.” Someone has placed a copy of a “Police Officer’s Prayer” next to the marker.

“It doesn’t say on his grave what a hero he became,” she noted. “But that doesn’t take away from what a hero he was.”

The latest to take his life was Laurence Martin.

He had been an Army captain in the Murrah building; Arlene Blanchard was a sergeant in the building. They worked in the recruiting station on the fourth floor; both were severely injured in the bombing.

She suffered a concussion and later developed ulcers. As months turned into years, she began drinking heavily. Eventually, Blanchard pushed away from alcohol and embraced God. Today she speaks to groups around the state, sometimes in Texas too, telling them that the Lord saved her for some higher calling.

At first, Martin considered himself fortunate to have gotten out alive--despite severe glass cuts to his eye.

“The back stairwell was still intact,” he related in an alumni newsletter to his old military academy. “God really must have been watching over me.”

He hoped to stay in the Army. “I may have a medical board [of review] in the future to determine if I should leave the Army because of my injuries,” he wrote. “If this happens, it happens. I am a positive person and I can accept any challenge I put my heart and mind to.”

And he prayed for a full recovery. “As for the glass that entered my left eye, it will gradually fall out as the days go by,” he wrote.

But life after the Murrah bombing was not kind. His Army career ended and he tried substitute teaching. A romance bloomed, then faded. Underneath everything lay a bombing that claimed the lives of seven of his Army colleagues and the 3-year-old daughter of a visiting sergeant.

Last October, at the age of 41, he flew alone in the single-engine Cessna, then went down nose-first into the church pasture.

He did not file a preflight check, and he ignored officials in the airport control tower who, alarmed at his erratic maneuvering, implored him to come back.

He will be remembered. Two of his uniforms and his dress shoes have been donated to the memorial museum, his photographs too. In each he is smiling.

And at his funeral they read from the Book of Isaiah, the passage about those who trust in the Lord, for “they shall mount up with wings as eagles.”

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Serrano reported this story while on assignment in Oklahoma City.