OKC Bombing -- still with us

…U.S. District Judge Edward Korman in Brooklyn reduced the 40-year racketeering sentence being served by Gregory Scarpa Jr. as he blasted prosecutors and the FBI for their handling of the reduction request. The 10-year reduction means Scarpa could be eligible for release in 2025, though the judge said he could die before that because of cancer and generally poor health.

In a written ruling, the judge said that the son of an infamous Colombo crime family enforcer reached out to the government in 2005 while Scarpa and Terry Nichols were serving time together. The judge noted that Scarpa told the FBI Nichols had told him there was a secret cache of explosives in the house where he lived at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing.

An FBI agent interviewed Scarpa, and a polygraph examination was conducted, but the FBI did not conduct the search until it was prodded to do so by a congressman who was contacted by a private forensic investigator Scarpa had contacted, the judge said.…

When Officer Don Hull pulled 1-year-old Joseph Webber out of the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, he had no idea if the boy would live or die. … Twenty years after the bombing, Hull and Webber, now a 21-year-old college student studying zoology at Oklahoma State University, were reunited. …

…He wasn't a firefighter at the time. Hrivak was a nursing student and fresh out of the Air Force. He had extensive mountaineering and rope rescue experience, which first responders thought would be useful at the site of the bombing. He learned everything on the job during the six weeks he was there, searching for survivors, sifting through debris, and trying to help heal a broken city. And years later, those experiences turned out to be invaluable, when Hrivnak's team got the call to respond to the Oso [Washington] mudslide….

…the woman whose leg was amputated in the midst of the crumbled Murrah building… After hearing that Daina’s prosthetic is out-dated and ill-fitted, someone decided that Daina could still use a little help. A GoFundMe campaign has been started to raise funds for a new leg for Daina.…

…After taking care of pediatric patients who came in right after the bombing, ambulances stopped coming to the hospital, so Dr. Tuggle and his colleague, Dr. Andy Sullivan, decided to go straight to the blast zone. Police led them to Daina Bradley, a 20-year-old mother of two, was trapped under a collapsed column. Her right leg was pinned under a beam. The doctors had to make a quick decision to safe Bradley’s life.

“Could we cut through the pillar? Could we raise it with the jaws of life? And there was no way. It was just going to bring the building down. So, Andy talked about the options and said, ‘it looks like we are going to have to amputate….'”

…When I drove back to Norman to head to the newsroom, the radio alerted me that children had perished at the daycare, and I began to weep as I drove. The adrenaline started to fade, and I began to grasp the reality and scope of what had happened.

In the days that followed, I tried to convey the emotions and the feel of the recovery in my stories. But ... there really were no words. So many people were terribly injured. So many people had died. So many people were emotionally broken. Including me. …

…By the time the group was in the sentencing phase of the trial, Leeper says the jurors had a rapport and a mutual respect.

“Of course it was a heavy burden for us to come to a decision,” he said. “There was a major concern on my part that whatever we walked out of there with would be questioned by the public. We didn’t know whether Mr. McVeigh was a leader or part of a conspiracy against the government. We didn’t know if there was a feeling out there in the public as to pro or con for the death penalty.” …

On April 19, 1995, Susan Walton walked into the Credit Union in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Those would be the last steps she would take on her own for more than five years. … The triage doctor never expected Susan to live. … “After 20 years, things are starting to fall apart again. So, they’re having to start rebuilding me all over again,” Susan said. …

…Joe Wallace is an EMSA paramedic. …he'd only been on the job two years. On April 19, 1995, Wallace happened to be sitting inside an ambulance near the Murrah Building. …he felt a "thunderous boom", and the truck shook. And when he looked around the corner, he saw a large cloud of black smoke. …

Using e-mails and handwritten notes acquired in that lawsuit, Trentadue demonstrated in his correspondence to Patrick Leahy that then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder had engineered a scheme to sidetrack any investigation into his brother’s death in order to “deflect congressional oversight and media attention.”

In a response filed yesterday to a federal judge's order May 11, an FBI official offered no denials about the existence of video images captured by more than 20 surveillance cameras operating prior to 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, in the vicinity of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Instead, he explained that officials at the bureau merely cannot find the tapes and raised the possibility that they "might have been misfiled and thus could be located somewhere other than in the OKBOMB file (though it would be impossible to know where)."

After admitting a role in the Oklahoma City bombing, Terry Nichols gave conflicting statements about whether another conspirator, John Doe No. 2, existed, recently released FBI reports show.

In one interview, on May 26, 2005, "Nichols declined to identify John Doe #2," the FBI reported. "Nichols advised John Doe #2's name had not been mentioned during the investigation and, as a result, he feared for his life and his family's well being should it become public." In an interview the next day, "Nichols declined to provide any significant new information. Nichols advised he would pass a polygraph examination," the FBI reported. A month later, though, Nichols told a U.S. congressman during a prison interview that "he did not know 'John Doe,'" the FBI reported. Nichols told the congressman someone else was involved but would not name the other person at this time, the FBI also reported.

The author of a book on the Oklahoma City bombing says a man arrested in Quincy after a street fight is the same man she wrote about in her book, "The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing."