Child Center Took Brunt Of Car Bomb At Least 12 Children Are Dead, 2 In Critical Condition, 20 Missing

There was a terrible roar. The walls fell, the ceiling gave way and shards of glass like so many bright razors filled the air.

And, suddenly, a modern drama called urban terrorism had been transformed into an ancient ceremony of horror - the slaughter of the innocents.

“As we helped people on the street,” said Red Cross worker Jennifer Harrison, “we could hear children crying, like blowing in the wind. It just feels like a dagger in your heart. You couldn’t see them. You just heard their voices.”

The car bomb that leveled much of 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. Of the 40 children thought to have been in the building when the bomb went off, 12 are dead and 20 were listed as missing Wednesday night. The dead ranged in age from 1 to 7. Some of them were burned beyond recognition. One of the children known to have survived was in surgery Wednesday evening and the other in intensive care.

On the sidewalk outside the devastated Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building at midday, a young mother, her head swathed in bandages, sat weeping. Her husband and two daughters, ages 3 and 4, were among the missing. Another woman who survived the blast stood outside the building, screaming for her child. Rescue workers led her away just before they brought out a dead boy they believed was her son.

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.

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. Earlier, some of them had searched for victims in the devastated daycare center at the building’s west end.

Asked what it was like, nurse Rena Keesling, 28, pointed to a pile of bricks on the street and said, “like that.”

Keesling said she “saw decapitated bodies. Children were just all over. Their school papers and toys were strewn on the floor. One doctor who was with us picked up a group picture of the children and burst into tears. She couldn’t take it.”

Another nurse, Christine Johns, said: “Babies were wrapped around poles. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Her colleague, Bobby Johnson, 42 years old and the father of a 20-dayold son, had seen it before, but Wednesday’s carnage still brought him to tears. “I was in Vietnam,” he said “and I never thought I would see something like that again. But this is worse. It was awful. There was lots of blood and debris. Children’s bodies were mangled and decapitated.”

I was shocked to think that someone could do that to small children,” he said.

“I came to minister to the dead and dying,” he said. “They were all children - six babies.”Retired Oklahoma City police officer Kenneth “Sugar” Smith was in an office less than two blocks from the federal building when the concussion hit, sending everyone into the street.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “So, I pulled out my old badge and started directing traffic, helping to get people back away from the building.”

A distraught woman, spotting Smith’s badge, rushed up to him:

“My baby! My baby’s in the daycare center,” she said.

“Ma’am, I can’t let you go in there,” Smith told her.

Then, sobbing words that Smith said will haunt him the rest of his life, she said: “Yesterday was her birthday.”

Rescue worker Karen Hardesty helped comb the federal building wreckage with her dog, Lady, a hound specially trained to sniff out infants. Their scents, Hardesty explained, are different from those of adults.

“Lady is trained to find all humans, but looks harder and faster for babies,’ she said.

Lady made one find - a dead baby.

“It will hit me later,” Hardesty said. “While I’m doing it, I don’t have a problem, but later I’ll get shaky and I’ll cry.”

Many children in the YMCA facility - some of them as young as 18 months - also were injured, at least five of them seriously.

“It was really terrible with the (YMCA) day-care center,” said Oklahoma state Rep. Kevin Cox, who happened to be nearby. “Babies were crying and screaming, with blood and plaster and insulation on their bodies.”

At Children’s Hospital of Oklahoma, parents wearing a piece of masking tape inscribed with the last name of the child they hoped to find waited for any word.

Wanda McNeely searched frantically for her 6-month-old grandson’s name on the list of the injured. After checking with three hospitals, McNeely decided to go to the morgue at St. Anthony’s.

“We’re going to go and see if we can identify a body,” she said. “We’ve checked all the lists, now we’re going to the other side.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: The toll Dead: 31 bodies found. Injured: 200 hurt, 58 critically. Missing: 300 unaccounted for. Threats: Bomb threats in 11 cities close other buildings. For updates: Call Cityline 458-8800, category 6201.