On April 19, 1995, at 9:02 a.m. Timothy McVeigh detonated a bomb built by Terry Nichols at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children.
McVeigh and Nichols were both ex-marines turned white supremacists who hoped to start a far-right uprising against the United States government.
Siddarth Thomas ’25 commented, “White supremacist terrorism, to me, represents the failure of American society to coexist peacefully across racial borders.”
The bomb was made of two tons of fertilizer inside a rented Ryder truck.
Newspaper Advisor Susan Sutton, who was working at Bay City News at the time, recalled, “I remember walking into the news room that morning and everyone’s head turned toward me and no one said a word. I didn’t need to ask; I knew something tragic had happened, and then I turned to the bank of TV screens and saw the news reports about the Alfred Murrah building being attacked.”
While fleeing the scene, McVeigh was pulled over by state trooper Charles J. Hanger for a missing license plate.
According to Hanger, McVeigh threatened, “Officer, my weapon is loaded,” to which he replied, “So is mine.”
McVeigh was arrested and eventually discovered to be the perpetrator of the attack when the rear axel of his rented truck was discovered, and it was traced to him.
Co-conspirator Terry Nichols turned himself into the authorities out of fear of being killed. He hoped that people would sympathize with his sentiment if he were able to explain himself.
The attack was meant as retaliation against the federal government for the sieges of Ruby Ridge and the Camp Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. These two disasters led to the deaths of 90 people.
McVeigh was sentenced to death and executed in 2001. Nichols is serving 161 life sentences.
In the years following the attack, the federal government began a crack-down on white supremacist groups in the United States, but efforts were halted following 9/11.
On the 30th anniversary, former president Bill Clinton invoked the resilience of the people most affected, and called for national unity, saying, “If our lives are going to be dominated by efforts to dominate people we disagree with, we’re going to put the 250-year-old march toward a more perfect union at risk.”
