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Original subtitles

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Welcome to "How it Really Happened."

I'm Hill Harper.

Timothy McVeigh detonated a 7,000-pound truck bomb

in Oklahoma City,

killing 168 innocent people, including 19 children.

After McVeigh was arrested,

Americans were told the shocking news.

This was not the work of a foreign terrorist,

but a horror committed by one of our very own,

a young man who'd once fought for American lives

in the first Gulf War.

The question everyone asked now was,

How could a decorated American soldier

turn into a deadly American terrorist?

Here's how it really happened.

♪♪

♪♪

Woman: There are four elements

that I have to receive information regarding --

[ Rumbling ]

♪♪

Man: This information just now coming into the CNN center,

and we have learned that there has been

a large explosion at the Federal Building.

Woman: In the Alfred Murrah building, some type of explosion

has blown the side of the building off.

Man: There was a boom, and the building shook,

and the ceiling fell in.

Woman: It just kept falling.

It was a horrible noise,

horrible noise.

Man: There was nothing left.

♪♪

Woman: I thought it was the end of the world.

I just didn't know what else, what other explanation

it could be for what I was experiencing.

Even after I got out of the building, I was scared to death.

I just thought for sure that my life was going to end that day.

Being six months pregnant,

I was really scared for my daughter.

I hadn't felt her move since the explosion.

Man: We rush down there.

It was pandemonium and hysteria.

My stepdaughter, Frankie, worked at the federal credit union

in the Murrah building.

It was on the third floor.

When we got down there,

there was no Frankie.

Frankie had a daughter by the name of Morgan,

who was 2.

You hope for the best and prepare for the worst,

but that's easy to say and hard to do.

Man: Dogs were brought in,

and highly sensitive microphones were used

in hopes of finding people still alive.

Woman: I couldn't see anything. I was completely buried alive.

I was actually still in my chair

and upside down in this rubble pile.

Rescuers came and began working to get me out,

and they worked until about 3:00-something that afternoon

until they were able to pull me out.

And I remember looking around and thinking,

"This is a movie.

This isn't real."

It looked like a war zone.

Man: At one point, rescuers found a woman

trapped under debris.

She was pinned underneath this enormous amount of wreckage,

pinned by one of her legs.

Man: She was lying in water. She was hypothermic.

Her blood pressure was falling.

And so, at that point, there was no decision

made other than to crawl into the space

and perform an amputation and bring the patient out.

The only choice really was to either do that or to die.

Potok: And ultimately he runs out of scalpels,

and he remembers he has a little pen knife in his pocket,

and the doctor actually manages to finish the amputation

with this pen knife that's about that long.

-How is she now? -She's doing fine.

I think she's stable.

Man: I don't understand how anybody in this world

could conceive to do something like that to innocent people.

♪♪

Less than two hours after the bombing,

Timothy McVeigh got arrested.

The police really got a lucky break.

McVeigh didn't have a license plate on his getaway car.

Investigators soon tied Timothy McVeigh

back to the rental truck that was carrying the bomb.

And the world was introduced

to the 26-year-old terrorist from upstate New York.

Man: McVeigh, when you met him,

you were surprised at how affable he was,

easy to talk to.

We learned that he was from a very ordinary,

normal American family.

Like many young men, his parents were divorced.

He was bullied as a kid and struggled to find his way.

Then he found a true friend in his grandfather.

His grandfather was really into guns

and taught Timothy McVeigh

at a very young age how to shoot.

Man: He had a great love of guns,

and I believe that's what led him to sign up

and join the Army.

♪♪

♪♪

He loved being in the Army, and he loved shooting.

He was an expert marksman.

Soldiers did not see a terrorist in the making.

They saw him as being a true battle buddy, a true comrade.

Man: McVeigh's end game with the Army

was to become a member of Special Forces, a Green Beret.

He wanted to be a part of the elite.

The Army is satisfying his desire to shoot weaponry.

And one of the things he really excelled at

was the Bradley fighting vehicle.

It's an armor-plated vehicle.

It has a 25-millimeter cannon on it.

And he actually becomes the top gun in his company.

So, at this point McVeigh feels like

he's at the top of the world.

But then one event would really change everything.

Man: Probably the most single important moment

in the kind of radicalization of Tim McVeigh

is when he takes a shot at an Iraqi soldier

standing 2,000 yards away.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

People we talked to who were in his unit that witnessed

this told us that it was like seeing somebody step up

and get a hole in one on the first hole.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

Man: He was a hero for that.

He got a Bronze Star and later would be promoted to sergeant.

You think that would something he'd be proud of,

but for McVeigh, it became,

"Why am I killing Iraqi soldiers?

They haven't done anything bad to me.

I'm out here shooting these people.

They're just like I am."

McVeigh talked about it in an interview on "60 Minutes."

I went over there hyped up, just like everyone else.

Not only is Saddam evil -- all Iraqis are evil.

What I experienced, though,

was an entirely different ball game.

And being face-to-face,

close with these people in personal contact,

you realize they're just people like you.

He started to realize that America, in his mind,

was the biggest, meanest, cruelest bully

in the entire world.

Man: To see those images of children

being pulled out of that building is just incredible.

[ Shouting indistinctly ]

Woman: I remember screaming, and I said,

"I left my boys in there this morning."

♪♪

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Man: For McVeigh, he couldn't really understand,

"Why am I killing Iraqi soldiers?

They haven't done anything bad to me."

All: Hoo-ah!

Man: He's still not quite sure, though,

he's gonna continue in the military

because what he really wants in life

is to be in Special Forces.

Tim McVeigh wants to be a Green Beret.

Man: He gets this call for the Special Forces,

and he's heading back to the States

to go through the training for that.

I think he would have put aside his growing hatred

for the government if he could have been going out

after the enemies of the state around the globe.

But you have to be in optimum physical shape

for the Special Forces, and he's nowhere near that.

He essentially flunks.

Man: This is a massive disappointment for McVeigh.

He quits the Army altogether.

He's disillusioned, and he moves back to Pendleton

in upstate New York.

It's cold. It's wet.

His family isn't much to him.

And he's just kind of kicking around, not knowing what to do.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

Man: He came home with a whopping case of PTSD

from the war, as evidenced by the fact

that one day in the middle of February,

he shows up at his grandfather's house...

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

♪♪

Man: He was just going through so much pain

because he was considered a war hero,

and he just couldn't make it in the real world outside the Army.

Ultimately, Timothy McVeigh leaves New York.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

Man: He essentially becomes kind of a road warrior.

He's simply rootlessly moving around the country.

He was searching for something, something to belong to,

something to take the place of the Army.

And he found that at gun shows.

There's nothing that McVeigh loved more in the world

than guns.

Man: Once he enters the world of the gun shows,

he's really in the universe of the radical right.

The gun shows are just alive

with the anti-government movement.

Man: He would meet people there

that were convinced that Bill Clinton

was going to send soldiers to every home in the country

and take guns away from law-abiding citizens.

As smart as he was, he was very impressionable.

More and more, he's getting wrapped up

in their conspiracy theories.

People are selling books like Hitler's diary,

"Mein Kampf," at these shows.

But the book that influenced him the most was a book

he had been reading before he joined the military.

It's called "The Turner Diaries,"

which becomes sort of a must-read

for people in that right-wing group.

"The Turner diaries" was written by the leader

of the most serious neo-Nazi group in America,

the National Alliance.

Man: The backbone of "The Turner Diaries"

is this story about this right-wing patriot

who sees tyrannical government overreach

and that he has to be the one to save the day.

Ultimately, the book kind of culminates in this man

blowing up the FBI headquarters building in Washington, D.C.

It is a work of fiction, but it may have been a blueprint

for what happened in Oklahoma City.

McVeigh copied those details down to very small matters --

the same kind of truck bomb

and a whole number of other factors.

Tim McVeigh, he's already absorbed quite a lot of ideology

about the wickedness of the government,

and he's angry.

And then things start happening that just fuel his anger.

♪♪

Woman: Scores of federal agents and police have surrounded

the Idaho cabin of 44-year-old Randy Weaver.

Weaver is reputedly a member of the white-supremacist group

the Aryan Nation.

Man: Weaver had been under surveillance since February 1991

after refusing to appear in court

on a federal weapons charge.

After Randy weaver fails to appear in court,

U.S. Marshals go to his property to arrest him.

Then, disaster ensues.

There was a fire fight between Randy weaver's family

and U.S. Marshals.

Man: Weaver's 14-year-old son, Sam, and Marshal William Degan

were killed August 21st.

The next day, weaver's wife was shot in the head

by an FBI sniper.

Man: Anti-government people feel very strongly

that Randy Weaver's family was slaughtered there.

You gonna kill all the children?

You're gonna have nightmares about this!

Baby killer! Baby killer!

You're a baby killer!

Baby killer!

Man: Ruby Ridge became a rallying cry

for the anti-government folks,

Tim McVeigh included.

[ McVeigh ]

Man: And that was just the beginning.

Man: How much longer will you let this go on?

♪♪

I just arrived today.

Man: Now we have a very large-scale fire breaking out

on what must be the south side.

Man: I was actually there as a reporter in Oklahoma City,

covering the story.

And as I'm kind of running towards this huge police scene,

enormous crowds, cops everywhere,

I realized, "My God, it's April 19th.

It's the whole Waco thing come back to life."

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

Man: About six months after Ruby Ridge,

something happens down in Waco, Texas,

that enrages Timothy McVeigh even further.

An ATF task force is investigating a compound

run by a sort of religious cultist,

a man named David Koresh.

Man: The so-called "Branch Davidians"

were people who sold weapons

and manufactured illegal weapons for money.

So, they were very much in the kind of gun trade.

Man: The ATF makes a bold move.

They decide to storm the compound in a surprise raid.

[ Gunfire ]

♪♪

No one's gonna hurt me or my family.

That's -- that's -- that's American policy here,

'cause this ain't America anymore when the ATF

has that kind of power to come into anybody's home

and kick doors down and things like that.

Woman: Four agents were killed and more than a dozen wounded

in a blistering 45-minute shoot-out

when agents arrived at the compound this morning.

Man: Inside the compound, David Koresh was shot.

Six of his followers were killed.

Man: The whole world is watching this,

and with the whole world is Timothy McVeigh.

And what McVeigh and the rest of the radical right is seeing

is, this is what the government will do to people

who have unusual political ideas and are into weaponry.

And after that disaster, when David Koresh refuses

to lead his followers out, the FBI takes over.

Man: And the Waco confrontation begins --

what ultimately turns out to be a 51-day standoff

between an enormous array of Federal Forces

and something like 100 of these so-called "Branch Davidians."

There were completely, 100% innocent children in there

who were in there because their parents were.

What about the babies and the women?!

Don't you care about them?!

Woman: How could you miss what was going on in Waco back then?

It was on the news every single night.

I was a journalism major, and I went down to Waco

to find another angle to that story to write for the paper.

Just arrived today.

I met this gentleman sitting on the hood of his car,

selling bumper stickers.

He felt strongly that David Koresh

had his rights violated by having his compound stormed,

and he also felt that Americans were losing their rights.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

Rauch: His overall message was, "We need to fear the government.

They're coming, just like they did with David Koresh."

Man: McVeigh eventually went home,

but like the rest of the world, he kept watching.

And, finally, after about seven weeks of negotiations,

the FBI decides to make a move --

a very aggressive move.

♪♪

Man: Federal Agents bring in Bradley fighting vehicles,

and they start to inject CS gas into the building.

Man: See, they've made a massive hole

in the side of that building.

All of the sudden, there's a lick of flame.

Comes out of one side of the building.

Man: Now we have a very large-scale fire

breaking out on what must be the south side.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

Man: There are children in there,

as well as some 65-other people

who are burning to death at this very moment.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

After Waco, McVeigh started to formulate his plan.

This was his act of war against the U.S. Government.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

And he goes through a number of different scenarios.

But none of these things seem like

they're really gonna be enough,

that they're not gonna get the attention,

grab the government by the throat

and make it change its evil ways.

Man: McVeigh was gonna commit a bombing

and make it the worst bombing America had ever seen.

So, he started little by little to gather the materials

he needed to make this bomb.

Man: A bomb he planned to carry in the back of a truck,

and to build it,

he needed to get his hands on ammonium nitrate,

a highly explosive fertilizer.

So, he starts going to places that sell ammonium nitrate.

Man: And he knows, for the size explosion he wants,

he's gonna have to get a ton of fertilizer.

But he also doesn't want to raise suspicion.

Man: So, he buys a couple of hundred pounds here,

and then he buys a couple of hundred pounds here,

trying to stay below the radar.

Man: But McVeigh realizes at some point

that he can't do this all alone.

Man: So, he turned to two fellow soldiers

that he had met in the Army years earlier,

Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier.

Both of them shared McVeigh's really intense

hatred of the government.

But the planner of all this was McVeigh.

The other two guys were basically flunkies.

They got a couple of storage units,

and they put in five or six

50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate.

What is tougher is the fuel that they need to mix with it.

For that you need a very high-powered fuel.

Nitromethane racing fuel to act

as the main accelerant in the bomb.

Man: So, they end up going down to the Texas Motorplex

south of Dallas,

and McVeigh poses as a rider needing the fuel.

People he's trying to buy it from are a little shocked

because you use tiny amounts of this fuel.

To buy three barrels is unheard of.

The first guy in fact refuses to sell to him.

He doesn't believe that he's really gonna use this

for racing, as he claims.

Ultimately, he finds a second seller, who does sell it to him.

And so, they gradually built up their supplies.

Man: During this time, McVeigh is scouting the country,

trying to determine where the bomb is going

to have the most impact.

There are several federal buildings in the country

that get looked at as possible sites for the bomb.

[ McVeigh ]

Man: McVeigh's criteria was to cause the maximum amount

of damage to law enforcement.

He picked the Murrah building after finding it in a phonebook.

Man: He wanted the building, once it was bombed,

to present an incredible spectacle.

[ McVeigh ]

Man: And he chose a date in history

that for him was very significant --

the second anniversary of the fire at Waco.

♪♪

Man: McVeigh was kind of the ultimate soldier.

All that mattered to him was the mission,

and, by golly, he was gonna carry it out.

Welcome back.

The Oklahoma City bombing took the nation by surprise,

forcing Americans everywhere to confront an evil

they never knew existed.

Timothy McVeigh claimed his bomb

was meant to sent a message to the U.S. Government.

But, in reality, the devastation in Oklahoma City

was felt most by the everyday Americans

he claimed to be fighting for.

Man: McVeigh got up that morning,

looked around his truck,

and headed off to Oklahoma City,

ready to wreak havoc on the world.

Woman: With regard to this proceeding,

basically there are four elements

that I have to receive information regarding --

[ Rumbling ]

Man: A car bomb ripped apart

a federal building in Oklahoma City.

Hundreds are injured. Many are dead.

Woman: I remember screaming,

"I left my boys in there this morning."

I had two grandsons in the daycare center

at the Murrah Building.

Aaron was 5, and Elijah was 2.

When I got them dressed that morning,

I think Elijah had on a shirt with a teddy bear.

When I got to the building,

I approached the building from one side

that didn't have any damage.

And so, some of the panic went away

until I walked around to the other side of the building.

There was no building.

All the building was laying in the street.

When I saw that, I sort of went crazy.

Man: My goodness.

There's got to be people dead in there.

Coverdale: I kept saying, "I've got to go in there."

Somebody grabbed my arm,

and I remember jerking my arm away from them,

and I got upset

because they wouldn't let me go in the building.

But there was no place to go, anyway.

Some of the other parents, and they came up to me,

and I was still screaming,

and they didn't know where their children were, either.

[ Screaming indistinctly ]

Let me in! [ Screaming ]

Man: You can't help that.

The parent in you comes out.

If that were my kid in there,

I would hope somebody would run in there and get my kid.

Man: Now it's like there's people

trying to get into the building.

In your mind, you're always thinking you're gonna maybe

find that one more person alive.

That drove a lot of people to keep going.

Man: There's injured people all over the place, way up there.

I always had a lot of faith,

and I remember talking to God and I'd say,

"Just let them be alive.

If they're injured, that's okay.

I'll take care of them.

But just let them be alive."

I mean, they were babies.

Man: My partner had just picked up a little boy,

and he was walking out with him, holding him.

He had this look on his face, and I asked, "Is he alive?"

And he said, "No, Jerry, he's not."

And I remember that he had a sweater on,

and it had a picture of a teddy bear on the front of it.

I took this little boy over to

what now has become a makeshift morgue,

which is the playground where the kids played.

We laid him down, and a nurse came by,

and she took a tag,

and she wrapped it around his little foot,

and, boy, I tell you what, that hit home.

That really hit home.

♪♪

Man: We're hoping that some of these youngsters

that are still trapped in that building will not come out dead,

but we can find them.

Bill Clinton: The bombing in Oklahoma City

was an attack on innocent children

and defenseless citizens.

It was an act of cowardice, and it was evil.

♪♪

Coverdale: Three days after the bombing,

I heard somebody call my name.

That's when they told me they had found their bodies.

And I remember screaming, screaming at God, "I begged you.

I begged you to let them be alive,

and you didn't even hear me."

To see those images of children

being pulled out of that building is just incredible.

I think this sends a shock wave throughout America.

The photograph that's really become iconic

of the Oklahoma City bombing

is of a fireman holding one of the youngest victims,

Baylee Almon.

A gentleman came up to me and said he had a critical infant.

And he handed me a baby.

And the first thing I did was check her for any signs of life,

which I didn't find any.

So, I walked across the street with the baby

and looked at the paramedic and told him,

"I have a critical infant."

And I remember looking at her, thinking that somebody's world

is getting ready to be turned upside down,

'cause I knew her fate.

Woman: He's a toddler. He's about 20 months old.

Man: At the end of the day, there were 168 people killed,

and that 168 people included 19 small children.

Man: Got one here! Got a child here!

Man: Out of the way.

Man: We got the call.

Frankie had been positively identified.

I just don't know that there's any formula

that you can follow to prepare for the worst

and especially when it comes to losing a child,

not at 23, in the prime of life.

And then you're thinking, "What are you gonna tell

a two-year-old? What about her mom?"

Man: On the morning of April the 19th, 1995,

my daughter Julie Marie died.

Julie worked as a Spanish translator for Social Security,

on the first floor of the Murrah Building.

She had gone to the Social Security

waiting room to get a client,

and had she been at her office, she would have been okay

because there was no one killed in her work area.

But she was killed because she had left

and went to the front of the building.

After Julie's death, I went through a lot of grief,

and I went to the bomb site each day,

felt a special closeness by going there.

Man: A cleansing rain fell in Oklahoma City,

as thousands of mourners in a solemn processional

made their way past the bomb site.

The survivors and families of victims

each placed a single rose amidst the debris.

It was a void that you can't fill,

and that became the beginning of a long road.

Woman: The judge has sworn the jury,

and opening statements have begun.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

Woman: The jury is in the courtroom.

The judge has sworn the jury,

and opening statements have begun in the trial

of United States versus Timothy McVeigh.

Man: When McVeigh came in every morning

before the jury showed up, he was smirking, laughing,

flirting with any women on his team.

[ McVeigh ]

Potok: But when it was time to all rise,

he would go into his soldier mode.

I think the prosecution put on a very, very good case.

They went through how they acquired the materials,

how the bomb was built.

I remember every Friday afternoon,

some of the last witnesses of the day

for that week would be victims

so that the jurors were left over the weekend

with a feeling of what it was like to be there

or to have lost someone during the bombing.

[ McVeigh ]

Man: The picture that emerged of McVeigh

was of this very manipulative and very selfish person,

who didn't really care about any of the people around him.

Coverdale: Sitting in the courtroom,

I'd just stare at him,

and I would wish that my mind would reach out

because I wanted to know why.

Why did you do this?

Potok: Timothy McVeigh wanted to have a necessity defense,

that he needed to blow up the federal building

because the federal government was an imminent threat

to the life and liberty of American citizens everywhere.

But Tim McVeigh's lawyer absolutely disagreed.

McVeigh's attorney argued that this was a broader conspiracy

and that Timothy McVeigh was really just a foot soldier.

But I think anyone who sat through the trial

would believe the same thing:

that Timothy McVeigh was guilty of the bombing.

Woman: It is a decision that has had much of the nation

holding its breath.

Today, the federal jury handed down its verdicts

against Timothy McVeigh -- guilty on all counts.

[ Reporter ]

Man: And now the question for the jury was,

"Should McVeigh be sentenced to die?"

Coverdale: You know, I wanted Tim to get the death penalty.

I have never believed in capital punishment,

but that's what anger does to you.

I want the man to spend a very --

till he draws his last breath in solitary confinement.

Tom Kight: Marsha thought it was too easy.

She was gonna have to live the rest of her life

without Frankie each day,

and she wanted McVeigh locked up

to suffer every day and think about what he did.

I mean, lethal injection, putting somebody to sleep

that has created such pain for so many,

I mean, that's too damn easy.

Man: I was so angry and so full of revenge.

It's hard to explain what you go through,

but I finally decided that killing him

was not what I wanted.

Is that going to help me to heal?

Tim McVeigh wanted the world to think that he didn't care

if he was put to death.

He felt he had already won.

[ McVeigh ]

♪♪

Woman: The jurors in

the Timothy McVeigh sentencing

of the Oklahoma City bombing trial

have sentenced Timothy McVeigh to death.

[ McVeigh ]

Man: McVeigh sees himself as a martyr to the cause,

and he decides to drop his appeals

and to not put any roadblocks in the way

so that his execution can go on as planned.

♪♪

When McVeigh's execution day came around,

it was quite a big deal.

Outside the execution chamber,

you have enormous numbers of people

demonstrating against the death penalty.

Man: It's wrong to take a person's life.

God will forgive you for all sins.

Man: And you also had an enormous amount of people

demonstrating, you know, "Kill him."

Man: Reference to older times.

♪♪

And he's on this gurney with this huge, white sheet on him.

Man: And they ask him two, maybe three times

did he have anything to say?

What I was looking for was maybe some apology or something,

just saying, "I'm sorry.

And he never uttered a word.

There was a moment where he sat up as best he could

and made eye contact with each person

and deliberately spending at least a second

with each of us, and then moving down the row.

That was the moment where he still seemed

to be holding on to Tim McVeigh, the soldier.

Man: And all of a sudden, you started seeing the tubes

were kind of swaying

as the chemicals came up into them one at a time.

[ McVeigh ]

33-year-old Timothy McVeigh,

a decorated Persian Gulf War veteran

and a mass murderer, was executed this morning.

We watched the execution here in Oklahoma City,

and I felt nothing.

I didn't feel any sadness.

I didn't feel any happiness.

I just felt dead inside.

George W. Bush: The victims of the Oklahoma City bombing

have been given not vengeance but justice.

For the survivors of the crime,

and for the families of the dead, the pain goes on.

Coverdale: There's not a day that goes by

that I don't think about my boys.

And I'd love to see them now because they'd be young men.

Welch: My daughter Julie is on my mind most all the time.

When your parents die, you go to the hilltop, and you bury them.

And when your children die, you bury them in your heart,

and it's forever.

It never goes away.

Tom Kight: And I see Frankie in her daughter.

You know, she'll turn a certain way,

and she doesn't look exactly like her,

but there will be a certain just -- you know?

Woman: The years that followed the bombing were really dark,

but I kept going back in time to that moment

when I looked up at the sky, and I promised God,

"I'll never live my life the same."

I had a second chance.

I've worked to improve by losing weight, from over 355 pounds.

I was buried alive wishing I had a child,

thinking I'm gonna die without ever being a mother.

And today, I'm the proud mother of a 19-year-old.

I've gone back to school.

I became president, CEO of the same credit union

that I was working at that day,

the same credit union I started out as a teller.

I can't even explain to you how dramatically different

my life is now than my life was before.

Woman: I have just tried to live a good life

and try to appreciate every day that I have.

My daughter ended up being born on her due date.

She came out perfectly healthy.

And she is now 23, and she graduated from college,

and she is aspiring to be a teacher.

Man: When something bad happens,

there is this tendency to think that it's somebody else.

"It's not us."

The thing that I think we learned

is not only can an American do this,

but somebody that served in the military.

This is homegrown.

McVeigh really thought that this bombing

would kick off the revolution,

that Americans from coast to coast

would realize how evil the government had become

and would rise up and smash the state.

And I think he realized quite clearly by the time he died,

it didn't happen, and it wasn't gonna happen.

♪♪

Timothy McVeigh's accomplice Terry Nichols

was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Michael Fortier agreed to testify against McVeigh

in exchange for a 12-year prison sentence

and is now in the witness protection program.

Five years after the cowardly attack,

President Bill Clinton dedicated a memorial

to the victims and survivors on the site

where the Alfred Murrah Building once stood.

It features 168 empty chairs, one for each of the lives lost.

I'm hill harper.

Thanks for watching.

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