Ed. Note: Friday marks the24th anniversary of the bombingof the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, when a former American soldier and Gulf War veteran, Timothy McVeigh, parked a rented truck carrying a five-ton fertilizer bomb outside the building before walking away.
After the bomb detonated, 168 people died and 680 were injured.Among the dead were 19 children, 15 of whom were in the America’s Kids day care center on the building’s second floor.
After the attack, PEOPLE spotlighted the poignant tragedy of the young victims in the day care center. Here is PEOPLE’s cover story from the May 15, 1995 issue.
Of all the victims in the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, the most pathetic — and the source of the most anguish — are the children, most of whom died in the America’s Kids daycare center. The six-year-old, 13-room facility, housed on the second floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, was apparently less than 30 feet from the explosion, and of the three adults and 21 children who were present that morning, only six youngsters survived.
Around 8 a.m. the other children began arriving. Dana served them breakfast of milk and muffins as each sat in an assigned seat in the main room. “This was the time that Dana encouraged the children to learn social skills,” says A.C. One little boy, Eric Lacy, 1-1/2, had arrived early and had already been picked up and taken to another school. By 8:30 the rest of the kids were ready for playtime classes in such things as arts and crafts to begin in the sunlit rooms decorated with their artwork.
Shortly before 9 a.m., Melva Noakes, 43, who had owned the center for only three weeks, phoned Dana to check in. The two were supposed to fly to San Francisco later in the day for a conference on child care, and Noakes was doing the payroll at another center in Choctaw, Okla., 20 miles away. Cooper told her that staffer Brenda Daniels, 42, was with the four youngest kids — 6-month-old Lee Gottshall; Jaci Coyne, 14 months; Tylor Eaves, 8 months; and Antonio Cooper Jr., 6 months — who had been put down for a morning nap in their cribs along the windows overlooking NW 5th Street. Wanda Howell, 34, had nine of the preschoolers in a windowless room at the center of the building, while Cooper herself was supervising seven toddlers, including 1-year-old Baylee Almon, newly released from the hospital after a bout with pneumonia.
source: people.com
