Woman’s Rage Fills Court In Bomb Trial ‘The Next Time I Saw Her She Was In A Box,’ Victim’s Mother Shouts
On the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, Ashley Eckles, who was 4 and a half, cried and made the plea most working mothers eventually hear: “Mommy, please don’t go to work Wednesday. Please stay home and play with me. I need you.”
“I couldn’t,” her mother, Kathleen Treanor, told the U.S. District Court jury which is weighing the penalty for Terry Nichols, convicted of conspiracy in the April 19, 1995, bombing. “I had just started a new job.”
Treanor, a church-going woman in a white suit, took Ashley to stay with her regular baby-sitter, her mother-in-law, LaRue Treanor, who was planning “a quick little trip” to the Social Security office in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that morning with her husband, Luther. All three died in the bombing.
“The next time I saw her, she was in a box,” Treanor said, weeping tears of anger. “I buried a little white box. I never saw her again! I had to live with the guilt of a mother who had to work. She was taken from me.”
Treanor looked straight at the jurors, who were red-faced and looking at the floor, and, in the most emotional outburst seen in this trial, told them the bombing had left her without a future. “It was gone!” she shouted, banging her hand on the podium in front her and turning to glare at Nichols. “It was stolen from me!” Moments later, as most of the spectators wept with her, she was excused.
U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch, who has run a strict courtroom and has threatened in the past to eject those who fail to hide their emotions, called the lawyers to the bench for a whispered conference, then told the jurors they must disregard the woman’s anger.
“Understandably, the woman lost control,” he said, but “we’re not here to deal with anger, grief, sorrow, or revenge.”
Treanor was among the last of 55 witnesses who testified for the prosecutors, who are arguing that Nichols should be put to death for his role in the bombing, which killed 168 people. On Friday, lawyers for Nichols will start calling witnesses to argue that his life should be spared. Wednesday, Matsch said he thought that testimony in the penalty phase of the trial would conclude by Tuesday.
Matsch began the morning by reminding the jurors they must not be swept away by the emotion of the testimony they are hearing.
“I have established some guidelines for that in advance with the lawyers so that it can, you know, be conducted with some dignity and respect for all concerned, including those who are no longer living,” he said.
“But of course, you know, we can’t put gags on people and we can’t expect people, when they are asked to talk about some of these things, to - well, to not spill over into some things that really shouldn’t be considered.”
Wednesday the jurors heard from rescue workers who still have nightmares, who saw children who had been torn apart and watched blood and remains run down the walls of the ruined building. Its floors, Mike Shannon, chief of rescue operations for the Oklahoma City Fire Department, told the jury, pancaked so tightly they would fit in the space between his palm and his elbow.
Alice Denison was one of those who rushed to the building for news of her father, Mickey Maroney, a Secret Service agent. She arrived at 9:22 a.m. and told the jury, “it was like Beirut.” She never saw her father alive again.
“He was my dad,” she said. “And he told me one time when I had my heart broken, he said, ‘There will always be one man that will never break your heart in life, and that’ll be me, your daddy.’ And my heart is broken because he’s not here.”
Megan Allen’s father, Ted Allen, died there in the office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Megan was 16. Her little brother Austin was 4.
“When all the other children write notes to their fathers,” she said, “he writes, ‘I love you. I wish this didn’t happen.’ “I feel guilty,” she continued. “I had more time to spend with him than Austin did.”