Oklahoma City: The Blood of Innocents

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Candy Avey, 48, had just parked her car at a meter outside the building and was heading for the Social Security office. "I was blown back, wrapped around the meter, and my face hit the car," she says. Her arm and jaw were broken, and her face quickly swelled and turned purple. "A man in front of me was just about to go through the door of the building," Avey recalls. "His arm was blown off. But he was in such shock that he didn't even notice it. He just kept on going, attempting to help others around him."

Many of the victims seemed most concerned not with their own injuries but with the fate of their friends. As co-workers struggled to rescue one another, a retired policeman pulled out his badge and began directing traffic away from the carnage. An employee of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was in an elevator at the time of the blast; he went into a six-story free fall. But having landed safely and climbed out of the rubble, he immediately went to work tracking down leads.

Trent Smith, 41, was lying on a bed across the street at the YMCA when the blast hoisted him seven feet in the air and tossed him toward the window. His 240-lb. frame shattered the glass. The next thing he knew, his body was hanging halfway out the square hole that was once a nice view of the federal building. Had he weighed less, he says, he would have been on the street. Groggy and bleeding, Smith backed away from the window, aching and exhausted. The more he limped, the more his leg hurt. He heard a man down the hall screaming. "He said he couldn't walk," Smith said, "but I told him that you gotta get outta there because there might be another bomb: 'You gotta get out!'"

The sirens summoned medical students and off-duty cops, paramedics, firemen, nurses and priests, blood donors and structural engineers, anyone who could provide help and advice and comfort and expertise. Rescuers swarmed from all corners of the city and eventually the surrounding states as well. So many nurses showed up so quickly, said one witness, that after half an hour there was at least one nurse for every victim. A priest in purple vestments and latex gloves tried to comfort the grieving and pray for the dead.

The sobs from inside the rubble told rescue workers instantly that children were still in the building, still alive. They plunged into the debris, turning over cribs and furniture, hoping to find signs of life, catching their breath at the sight of babies burned beyond recognition. "We started moving bricks and rocks," said police sergeant John Avera, "and we found two babies." Firemen tenderly carried the infants, as paramedics wrapped them in long white gauze like christening dresses. Several toddlers were found wandering around the underground parking lot, searching for parents. The parents in turn scrambled through the chaos, frantic to find their children. "You haven't seen my daughter, have you?" one woman asked everyone she passed.

Nurse Shirley Moser began tagging dead children. "Their faces had been blown off," she says. "They found a child without a head." Children from the YMCA day-care center across the street who survived the explosion tumbled into the street, sliced by the flying glass. They looked for parents and were scooped up by strangers, fearful of more tragedies.

Time.com

Oklahoma City: The Blood of Innocents

IN THE BOMB'S AFTERMATH, TALES OF HORROR AND HEROISM