At 8:57am on April 19th, 1995, Timothy McVeigh pulled a rented Ford F-700 truck to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma, ignited a five-minute fuse, and walked calmly to a get away car parked several blocks away, dropping the keys as he left.
At 9:02am, the truck, containing in excess of 4,800 lbs of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and a diesel fuel mixture, detonated on the north side of the building. The blast killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others, and 324 building were damaged in the blast that left a 30-foot wide, eight-foot deep crater.
At 9:00am that morning, Argos running back Brandon Whitaker was on his way to the Federal Building for a field trip, a trip that was especially exciting for the 10-year-old Whitaker as his mom worked in the building next door.
“Normally I wasn’t big on field trips,” said Whitaker. We’re sitting in the Hilton Hotel in downtown Toronto. The anniversary of the bombing has just passed and the episode of CBC’s Hello Goodbye featuring Whitaker’s story had aired a month prior. It’s fresh in his mind.
“I was really excited for this one because I knew I could go and see my mom right after.” When you’re a kid, getting to take a midday break from school to see your parents holds a certain appeal. It’s like playing hooky, but you’re parents say it’s ok.
Half way between his school and the building, the whole highway started to shake, like an earthquake. Everything stopped completely; all the cars screeched to a stop. Complete silence.
“Someone came on the PA and told the bus driver to turn around immediately,” says Whitaker. “I started getting really upset because I wanted to see my mom. I ran to the front of the bus and I just had this feeling that something was wrong. I ran to my teacher and kept asking, ‘what’s going on? Is my mom ok’ Just being a kid. I got immediately emotional.”
It took a while for the bus to be able to to turn around and head back to the school. In the era before cell phones and immediate news, no one really knew what was going on. The bus ride back was quiet.
Whitaker says he’s remembers a lot of whispering and waiting. “When we got back to the school, everyone was really quiet, and our teachers were standing in groups. We stayed like that for most of the day until my grandma came to pick me up. That’s when I knew something was really wrong.
Something was definitely wrong. Whitaker’s mother had gone missing in the immediate blast.
“I just kept asking ‘where’s my mom’, over and over. At that point, they didn’t know my mom was alive; they still hadn’t found her, so all my grandma knew was that she was missing.
She just kept telling me ‘everything will be ok.’ I just wanted my mom back.”
Paramedics ended up finding her later that evening. She had been trapped under a filing cabinet and rubble, severing several nerves in her neck in the process. It would be a long road to recovery with years of therapy.
“I remember when we went to see her that night I just kept thinking ‘wake up!’ I didn’t understand why she was sleeping. I was too young to understand what was really happening.”
It would be years later before Whitaker would realize the magnitude of what his family had gone through and what it meant – when he did a project on the bombing, complete with actual audio that his mother had given him and saw the faces of his classmates and his teacher.
“I think I just always thought of it as only happening to us,” he says, pausing momentarily. “My mom lost an uncle in the same bombing. Now every year my mom and I go back to the memorial and he has his name etched into the wall. It’s a time reflect and I always remember how lucky I am that my mom is still here. There’s a lot of names on that wall and there are a lot of kid who’s parents didn’t make it.
“It motivates me every day. It drove me to succeed in my career. I just never wanted to let my mom down. I almost lost her that day.”