Fortier to be released today
OKLAHOMA CITY – Today, Michael Fortier will cease to exist.
The star prosecution witness against Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols is scheduled to be released after 10 1/2 years in federal custody and … vanish.
A new identity. A new hometown. A new life story.
They’re all part of a deal struck with federal authorities that resulted in Fortier being the only known Oklahoma City bombing insider to be free again.
“He was the only inside person really able to testify to the motivation and the activities prior to the bombing,” said Irven Box, an Oklahoma City criminal defense attorney who covered the McVeigh and Nichols trials for the local CBS affiliate.
“He was a witness the government thought it needed,” Box said. “Could it have gotten a conviction without him? Maybe. … But it was a deal made in the early stages of the investigation. Prosecutors didn’t know if two were involved or 100 were involved.”
Now 37, Fortier was imprisoned for failing to alert authorities to the plot, selling stolen guns and lying to federal agents after the bomb shredded the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.
McVeigh, portrayed by prosecutors as the attack’s mastermind, was executed in 2001. Nichols, now 50, is serving a life-without-parole sentence at a federal prison in Florence, Colo.
Fortier’s coming release became public after the federal Bureau of Prisons alerted bombing survivors in a letter that arrived in their mailboxes Tuesday.
The notice renewed debate over Fortier’s role in the bombing – and his 12-year sentence. Some survivors and victims’ families think his penalty was sufficient. Others contend he deserved much harsher.
Dr. Paul Heath, a former Veterans Affairs psychologist who survived the blast, called Fortier “the luckiest man in the world.”
He said he found it ironic that Fortier was given a reprieve by the very system he and the others sought to attack.
“Fortier, by being willing to do a plea bargain, won the Powerball lottery of the justice system.”
While no longer behind bars, Fortier will be subject to three more years of federal supervision.
As the key witness against his former Army buddies-turned-anti-government-zealots, Fortier’s safety – both while in federal custody and upon his release – was evidently a source of much concern and debate.
Federal authorities, for example, steadfastly refused to identify his whereabouts during his decade-plus behind bars. Further, his attorney, Michael McGuire, of Tulsa, Okla., declined to discuss specifically what will become of him now.
McGuire did say, however, he expects Fortier, his wife, Lori, and two children will – at first – be “holed up, spending a lot of quiet time, personal time, getting caught up.”
“I don’t think they know for sure what they’re going to do and where they’re going to go,” he said, adding that once they are relocated, “It’s going to take them a while to settle in.”
McGuire said one certain thing about the Fortiers’ future is they will not live in Kingman, Ariz., where they resided at the time of the bombing.
By participating in the federal witness protection program, the Fortiers essentially agree to disappear. They are forbidden from doing media interviews. They are required to cease all contact with friends. And they can contact family only through federal agents.
The government will provide new identities and housing for the Fortiers and their children.