![]() “It was really terrible with the (YMCA) day-care center,” said Oklahoma state Rep. Many children in the YMCA facility-some of them as young as 18 months-also were injured, at least five of them seriously. “While I’m doing it, I don’t have a problem, but later I’ll get shaky and I’ll cry.” “Lady is trained to find all humans, but looks harder and faster for babies,” she said. Their scents, Hardesty explained, are different from those of adults. Rescue worker Karen Hardesty helped comb the wreckage with her dog, Lady, a hound specially trained to sniff out infants. Then, sobbing words that Smith said will haunt him the rest of his life, she said: “Yesterday was her birthday.” I can’t let you go in there,” Smith told her. “My baby! My baby’s in the day-care center!” she said. “So, I pulled out my old badge and started directing traffic, helping to get people back away from the building.”Ī distraught woman, spotting Smith’s badge, rushed up to him: Retired Oklahoma City police officer Kenneth (Sugar) Smith was in an office less than two blocks from the federal building when the concussion from the blast hit, sending everyone into the street. “I came to minister to the dead and dying,” he said. He had been in a neighboring church administering the last rites to victims of the blast, and was on his way from there to another temporary morgue. ![]() Johnson’s blue surgical outfit was stained with blood, and so were the purple vestments and latex gloves of Father George Miley, a Catholic priest hurrying down a nearby street. I was shocked to think that someone could do that to small children,” he said. Children’s bodies were mangled and decapitated.” “I was in Vietnam,” he said, “and I never thought I would see something like that again. Her colleague, Bobby Johnson, 42 years old and the father of a 20-day-old son, had seen it before, but Wednesday’s carnage still brought him to tears. She couldn’t take it.”Īnother nurse, Christine Johns, said: “Babies were wrapped around poles. One doctor who was with us picked up a group picture of the children and burst into tears. Their school papers and toys were strewn on the floor. Keesling said she “saw decapitated bodies. Earlier, some of them had searched for victims in the devastated day-care center at the building’s west end.Īsked what it was like, nurse Rena Keesling, 28, pointed to a pile of bricks on the street and said, “like that.” In the parking garage beneath the damaged building, a temporary morgue had been set up, and emergency medical technicians waited there for more bodies to be pulled from the rubble. Inside, rescuers tried to cover the bodies of the dead children with blankets, but the wind, pushing through the vacant spaces where walls and windows once had been, kept blowing them off. Rescue workers led her away just before they brought out a dead boy they believed was her son. ![]() Another woman who survived the blast stood outside the building, screaming for her child. Her husband and two daughters, ages 3 and 4, were among the missing. Murrah Federal Building at midday, a young mother, her head swathed in bandages, sat weeping. On the sidewalk outside the devastated Alfred P. One of the children known to have survived was in surgery Wednesday evening and the other was in an intensive-care facility. Some of them were burned beyond recognition. The dead ranged in age from 1 to 7 years old. Of the approximately 40 children thought to have been in the building when the bomb went off, at least 12 are dead and about 26 were listed as missing late Wednesday night. The car bomb that destroyed a nine-story federal office building here Wednesday exploded directly under a day-care center on the structure’s second floor and badly damaged another baby-sitting facility in a nearby YMCA.
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