📝 ‘We Will Never Forget’: How Covering The Biggest Story Of My Life Changed Me 🔌
Weekend Plug-in 🔌
Editor’s note: Every Friday, “Weekend Plug-in” meets readers at the intersection of faith and news. Click to join nearly 10,000 subscribers who get this column delivered straight to their inbox. Got feedback or ideas? Email Bobby Ross Jr.
OKLAHOMA CITY — The last week or two, I started feeling stressed. Agitated even.
For no apparent reason.
Then it hit me: The anniversary.
Saturday marks 30 years since the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history claimed 168 lives and wounded hundreds.
I didn’t lose a loved one. I suffered no physical injuries. But I — like the rest of my devastated community — witnessed the attack on the Heartland up close.
I didn’t realize until years later how deeply the bombing — and the weeks, months and even years spent reporting on it — touched me. I pretended that I, as a hard-nosed newspaperman, was immune from such a tragedy changing me.
I was wrong.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum pays tribute to the 168 people — including 19 children — killed in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. (Photo provided by Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum)
At 9:02 a.m. on that blue-sky Wednesday, I had just stepped off The Oklahoman’s eighth-floor newsroom elevator when we heard the boom and saw the smoke in the distance.
All of a sudden, my colleagues and I found ourselves covering the biggest story of our lives, even as we joined our community in grieving unfathomable loss.
I was 27 with a young wife and a toddler son. I worked for the newspaper’s Community section. My beat: the fast-growing suburb of Edmond, north of Oklahoma City.
I had two stories in the April 19, 1995, edition: one on a zoning fight over a 24-hour superstore and another on a dispute between Edmond’s police union and city leaders. Those exemplified my bylines at that time.
But the bombing changed my focus.
As editors assigned multiple reporters to head toward the smoke, I grabbed a yellow legal pad and jotted “Downtown explosion” at the top.
With other staff members — including my close friend and fellow Oklahoma Christian University alumnus Steve Lackmeyer — already at the bombing scene itself, I talked to people in the downtown area about what they had seen and experienced.
Those were the days before digital recorders, so I hurriedly scribbled notes. Seemingly every person I met on the streets had an incredible story to tell.
A car salesman named Ron White told me he had just stopped at a dry cleaners when the blast occurred. He watched the top of the nine-story federal building “just disappear.”
“It was big chunks of debris just twirling and shooting up in the air,” White said. “It still doesn’t even seem real.”
At some point that morning, a second bomb scare occurred, and people started running toward me. But my journalistic adrenaline kicked in, and I pushed against the crowd as I tried to go and figure out what was happening. (Older and wiser now, I wouldn’t do that again.)
After filling up my notebook, I can’t recall if I found a pay phone to check in with editors — that was years before I got my first cell phone — or simply headed back to the office to write. The Oklahoman didn’t have a website back then, and our deadlines for the next morning’s editions weren’t until that night.
“Morning of terror” was the banner headline atop The Oklahoman the morning after the April 19, 1995, bombing. The front page is shown at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. (Photo by Audrey Jackson)
When I returned to my car, I found the parking lot full of TV news vans that were not there before. I turned on the radio, and the newscaster was talking about President Bill Clinton’s response to the bombing. It’s crazy in retrospect, but I didn’t realize until then that the bombing was major national — even international — news.
By the second day, the huge nature of what had transpired became more clear. Editors informed us that we’d be working long hours and weekends. And they said The Oklahoman would pay overtime (something the paper did not have a reputation for doing, even when journalists routinely exceeded 40 hours).
Reporters were broken into teams to cover areas such as the criminal investigation and the physical damage. I was assigned to the victims team. Our role: to write about those who died, those who survived and their loved ones.
On Day 2, I produced a front-page story on one family:
Thirteen-year-old Ricky Hill and his brother Jonathan, 11, waited up late Wednesday hoping to hear from their mother.
Even as they drifted off to sleep, they clung to hope that Army recruiter Lola Renee Bolden, a 40-year-old single parent, had survived a thunderous bomb blast.
But her call never came.
The boys' distress turned into a real-life nightmare about 1 a.m. Thursday.
That's when three men and a woman, all clad in their best Army green, arrived at the door with the horrible news.
Neighbor Mechelle Murray, a single parent with children herself, had taken in the next-door neighbor boys when their mother failed to return home.
Even while calming Ricky and Jonathan, Murray had feared the worst.
On Day 3, I wrote another Page 1 piece:
For a third straight day Friday, family members of Rick L. Tomlin and scores of other missing bomb victims maintained an excruciatingly familiar routine:
Wait and hope.
"It's getting a little tense out here," said Tomlin's 24-year-old son Richard.
The Piedmont man's family once again convened at a downtown Oklahoma City church with many other families, anxiously awaiting any word — each passing hour taking its toll.
"We're three days into it and still waiting," said the son, from Kansas City, Kan.
Yet the Tomlins, like countless others victimized by the nation's worst terrorist attack, refused to give up hope.
Both my Day 2 and Day 3 stories appear in an Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum video that recounts those frantic days after the attack.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum highlights the work of journalists, including Bobby Ross Jr., after the 1995 bombing. (Photos provided by Bobby Ross Jr.)
Four days after the bombing — a Sunday — a community prayer service began the healing process for Oklahoma and the nation. I wrote a retrospective piece for The Associated Press in 2020 on that service’s importance.
In my mind, the period after the bombing is a blur. The victims team stayed busy writing individual profiles about everyone who died and updating readers on the progress of those who survived. In some cases, we were gathering personal details from relatives still holding out hope that their loved one might be found alive.
A week after the attack, fellow reporter Bryan Painter — normally my teammate on the Edmond beat — and I did a front-page piece on the impact on schoolchildren:
A week ago, thunder meant thunder.
Today, for Nick Allen and other Oklahoma children, thunder sounds like a bomb.
"He could do it again," Nick, an 11-year-old Windsor Hills Elementary student, said Tuesday.
"It just makes you scared because every time you hear a loud boom, you think it's a bomb."
Across town at the private Solomon Schecter Academy, Erielle Reshef, 11, says she can't sleep and has spent the last two nights in her parents' room.
Uncertainty and fear are in the air in many Oklahoma City area schools hit hard — too hard — by a disaster that robbed some children of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters.
"I'm scared someone is going to run down the street and, boom, someone's house is going to blow," Erielle said.
My colleagues and I were blessed to tell the stories of many victims and survivors.
One profile stuck with me, though: the one about a blue-eyed, light-brown-haired baby named Danielle:
Fifteen-month-old Danielle Nicole Bell was asleep when she and her mother arrived at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building about 8:30 a.m. that tragic day.
When Deniece Bell, 28, lifted her daughter out of her car seat, Danielle opened her eyes and leaned her head against her mother's chest.
As the mom explained Thursday, the blue-eyed, light-brown-haired beauty liked to show affection that way.
Once inside the America's Kids Day Care, Deniece Bell said she kissed her baby on the forehead, handed her a cup of milk and hurried to work at the post office two buildings away.
"She didn't like to be away from me," Bell, a 1985 Douglass High School graduate, said of her daughter, who clutches a stuffed teddy bear in a treasured snapshot.
But Danielle didn't mind spending Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at the federal day care.
After the bombing, I left a message on Deniece Bell’s home phone, expressing a desire to talk about her daughter. She called me back days later, thanking me for waiting until she was ready. She expressed frustration at certain national media outlets, which had harassed her and even shown up at Danielle’s funeral.
More than a week after the bombing, I visited Bell at her home. For a quarter-century, I never talked to her again. And she never did another newspaper interview. She preferred to rebuild her life in obscurity.
But in 2020, I caught up with her again. In my 2020 story, published on the front page of The Oklahoman, Bell-Pitner described how she progressed from anger at God to relying on him.
“I realized, ‘He’s the only way I’m going to get through this,’” she told me.
Bell-Pitner and I are now Facebook friends, so I keep up with her family and work that way. As the nation pauses to commemorate three decades since the bombing, I called Bell-Pitner once again.
“Remind me what you would like people to remember about your daughter,” I inquired.
“I mean, she was a 15-month-old little girl that was happy all the time,” Bell-Pitner replied. “She wanted everybody to be happy. She wanted to make you smile.
“I mean, she liked the birds, and she liked flowers and dandelions — she thought those were flowers,” the mother added. “She would pick those up and hand them to you. That was her.
“And she never got a chance to live her life.”
I count it a blessing that someone like Bell-Pitner has trusted me with her story.
“We Will Never Forget” became a mantra in Oklahoma City after the bombing.
Back then, I felt an obligation — a sacred calling even — to make certain my work did justice to the victims, the survivors and the family members. I focused so much on that obligation, in fact, that I ignored my own family without even realizing it.
When I wrote four bylined stories on Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, my wife, Tamie, told me she understood the extra hours.
“I just don't need you to go into your own little zone for months like you did the last time," she said, obviously referring to the bombing. "We've got three kids now instead of just one."
Huh?
Until then, I did not realize how greatly the bombing affected me. In fact, I didn't even cry until the second anniversary — the first major event related to that tragedy that I watched on TV instead of joining my newsroom family in covering.
Fast-forward to Saturday’s 30th anniversary.
President Bill Clinton greets Oklahoma City bombing survivor Susan Walton at a 1996 event marking the attack’s first anniversary. (White House photo)
With that milestone approaching, I interviewed Susan Walton — “the most severely injured” bombing survivor — about her journey since April 19, 1995. I wrote a more general piece about keeping the memory alive of all those who died or whose lives were forever changed.
And I probably put too much pressure on myself to make those stories perfect.
Thus, the aforementioned stress.
Now that I know what I’m experiencing — and why — I stand a better chance of dealing with it.
In the meantime, please join me in keeping the promise so many of us made back in 1995.
“We Will Never Forget.”
Inside The Godbeat
Carla Hinton, The Oklahoman’s longtime religion editor, has commemorated the bombing’s 30th anniversary with a series of stories:
• 'Faith endured:' Downtown OKC congregations' stories of resilience and hope in bombing aftermath
• Faith connections, including interfaith partnerships, flourished in wake of OKC bombing
• Prayer is 'foundation' of response before, after 1995 OKC bombing, mayor says
• Heartland Chapel near memorial gets restoration ahead of OKC bombing anniversary
The Final Plug
Because of my emphasis on the bombing anniversary, I neglected to highlight Religion Unplugged’s Holy Week coverage.
But be sure to check out the interesting stories by Mark A. Kellner, John Semakula, Angela Youngman and others published this week.
To all who celebrate it, Happy Easter weekend!
Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.