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| By Jon Bonné MSNBC | |||||
| June 11 — Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who personally wrought destruction on his nation as no American before him, died Monday as he lived — unflinching and unrepentant. His death at 8:14 a.m. ET was announced by prison warden Harley Lappin just minutes later: “The court order to execute inmate Timothy James McVeigh has been fulfilled.” | |||||
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HIS EXECUTION by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre
Haute, Ind., brought at least partial closure to a tale unlike any other
in U.S. history; his crusade against a government he found rife with
tyranny ended with that government taking his life. He was 33. He did not speak before he died, but gave Lappin a handwritten copy of the 1875 poem “Invictus,” by British author William Ernest Henley to pass on to media witnesses. McVeigh made eye contact with witnesses before the execution began, and looked up at a camera mounted on the ceiling that provided a feed to Oklahoma City. He died with his eyes open. Linda Cavanaugh, a witness and reporter for KFOR-TV, said McVeigh looked paler and thinner than he had in the past. “He did not have the same look of arrogance that he had in the courtroom in Denver” during his trial, she said. He wore a white T-shirt and sneakers. McVeigh’s last moments came strapped to a padded metal stretcher inside a squat red brick building on the prison grounds. Needles in his veins delivered a sequence of fatal chemicals. The first, thiopental sodium to relax him and render him unconscious, was delivered at 8:10 a.m. ET; the second, pancuronium bromide to collapse his lungs and stop his breather, was given at 8:11 a.m.; after several heavy breaths, his breathing became shallow and the final drug, potassium chloride to stop his heart, was given at 8:13 a.m. The injections were administered by officials of the federal Bureau of Prisons. Lappin pronounced McVeigh officially dead. |
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In a building at the Oklahoma City airport, 232 of those family members and survivors of the blast watched McVeigh die via a special closed-circuit TV link. The unusual broadcast — which officials took pains to ensure wasn’t leaked or videotaped — was devised when the Justice Department realized it couldn’t accommodate the number of eligible victims and relatives who hoped to witness McVeigh’s demise. “It’s really the closing of a circle,” Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating told NBC’s “Today” program. “For this community, it is closure.” A CHANCE TO MOVE ON |
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Before he died, he expressed a half-hearted remorse, saying of the
168 he killed that he was “sorry these people had to lose their lives,” in
letters published Sunday in his hometown newspaper, the Buffalo News. Yet
he maintained his act was a “legit tactic” in his one-man war against the
government. For many whose lives were shattered by McVeigh, his death was a chance to close out the most devastating part of their lives. “Today we saw justice,” said Kathleen Treanor, who lost her daughter and parents in-law in the blast. “This man clearly deserved what he got. He died peacefully, which I cannot say my three members of my family did.” For others, his death would not mark a closure, either because they felt the pain and the impact of McVeigh’s act would go on, or because it would leave unanswered the many questions that have continued to plague the investigators and survivors in the six years since the blast. “An execution is an event,” Bud Welch, whose daughter Julie died in the bombing, told NBC, “and when the sun sets on this day, we’re going to end up with a huge staged political event.” Still others felt that McVeigh shouldn’t be allowed to die without telling all he knew of his bombing plot. “I’ve been opposed to killing him, because I believe with the death of McVeigh dies the truth,” said Kathy Wilburn, whose two grandsons died in the blast. With McVeigh’s death, the government’s best hope of uncovering any additional conspirators vanishes. McVeigh himself was unequivocal: “The truth is, it was just me,” he insisted to biographers Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, who laid out his story in “American Terrorist.” He refused a final interview with the FBI, suspecting the federal agents would “abuse their power” and harass other anti-government activists. Not only law enforcement and prosecutors, but even McVeigh’s original defense lawyer Stephen Jones, remain convinced that others were involved in the bombing. Six years of investigating a so-called “John Doe No. 2” have remained fruitless — though the search for more answers is unlikely to end with McVeigh’s death. LONG ROAD TO DEATH |
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This solemn day
has been a long time in coming. McVeigh himself essentially guided his
fate when, last December, he asked his lawyers to cease filing a seemingly
endless series of appeals. U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch, who
presided over not only McVeigh’s trial but that of co-conspirator Terry
Nichols, granted McVeigh his death wish and newly appointed Attorney
General John Ashcroft earlier this year set McVeigh’s execution for May
16. Those plans were upended just days before McVeigh was to die when the FBI admitted to Matsch that they had misplaced thousands of pages of documents from the bombing investigation. The FBI faced a barrage of criticism — and critics raised the sorts of suspicions about heavy-handed government cover-ups that McVeigh had long been obsessed by. Ashcroft delayed the execution by a month to give McVeigh’s legal team a chance to review the new documents. But a month later, despite pleas by his attorneys that the impact of the Justice Department’s document flub had been a “fraud on the court” and gave them potential grounds for appeal, Ashcroft insisted McVeigh be killed. After two courts sided with the government last week, McVeigh himself weighed in and agreed to allow his own death to proceed. So, for a second time, a deluge of media, law enforcement and activists descended on the modest Midwestern city of Terre Haute, site of the U.S. government’s only execution facility, to stage a slowly enacted pageant that would mark the demise of a man whose evil was balanced by his utterly typical American upbringing. Thousands of reporters and TV staffers, protesters for and against the death penalty, and hundreds of police were on hand Monday to wait for word that McVeigh was dead. ‘STATE-ASSISTED SUICIDE’ |
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If anything,
McVeigh’s pernicious plot gave him a sense of purpose, one he couldn’t
find even as he tried to return to his Christian roots and searched for a
creed he could accept. “I knew I wanted this before it happened,” he told Herbeck and Michel. “I knew my objective was a state-assisted suicide.” For many years, McVeigh’s struggle was to find a place that would accept him for who he was. When his associate college, Bryant and Stratton, forced him to add liberal arts to his computer studies, he dropped out to return to his job at Burger King. When neighbors complained about the noise from his frequent target practice in his father’s back yard, he bought a plot of land in rural southwest New York so he could have some peace. His comfort with the structure and rules of Army life morphed into betrayal when he discovered the politics that governed so much of armed service. His sense of place in rural Arizona, which stoked his survivalist interests, was scuttled by his marijuana- and methamphetamine-laced respite with Army buddy, and eventual accomplice, Michael Fortier. In the end he determined, as he said from his prison cell, “This world just doesn’t hold anything for me.” |
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 A GROWING HATRED McVeigh’s death echoed much of the stark determinism of his short life. He was born in the town of Pendleton, N.Y.; his mother Mickey, a travel agent, and father Bill, an auto worker, tried to provide a stable middle-class home for their three children. But the marriage soured and McVeigh’s adolescence was marked by the strife of his parents’ divorce. His hatred of bullies, from childhood on, turned into a rage as he witnessed the overwhelming force of allied troops during his Gulf War service and wondered why the United States seemed so unconcerned with the impact of the war on regular people. That same revulsion of abuses of power sparked his disgust with the assault on separatist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 Waco siege on David Koresh and the Branch Davidians — and made him feel retaliation was his responsibility. “Once you bloody the bully’s nose, and he knows he’s going to be punched again, he’s not coming back around,” he told his biographers. Yet he couldn’t see, even at the end, how his treacherous act was the ultimate in bullying. Even Randy Weaver, who lost his wife and child in Ruby Ridge and told the Washington Post McVeigh was just “trying to make a point,” has distanced himself from the heartlessness of the Oklahoma City blast. In a nasty jag of irony, McVeigh’s intended message about the government was all but lost amid the sheer horror of what he wrought. Even his victims understood how tragic McVeigh’s tale had been. Ridley said McVeigh’s father and sister Jennifer should be added to the list of his victims after Monday’s execution. “These have been two people who have been tremendously hurt,” she said. “I don’t think he gave a thought of what he left behind him and the people he hurt.” A HARDENED WORLD VIEW McVeigh ended up offering as a final statement, as he had said he would, Henley’s lines of “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” Like Henley, McVeigh was a staunch agnostic. But Henley wrote the poem as a triumph over his tuberculosis and personal anguish. Nelson Mandela quoted it to his fellow prisoners as a snippet of hope. McVeigh might have relished the notion that his “head is bloody, but unbowed,” as Henley wrote, yet he left little sign he understood why his seething anger couldn’t possibly justify the horror he wrought. Even as he admitted regret in letters to the Buffalo News just a day before his death, he maintained the hard thoughts he so often associated with the military he loved, then came to loathe. “It’s understood going in what the human toll will be,” he wrote. In his final letters, McVeigh insisted that he had no fear of his execution. He said he would “improvise, adapt and overcome” if it turned out that there was an afterlife. “If I am going to hell,” he wrote, “I’m gonna have a lot of company.” In the end, his rage was simply an evolution from his carefree and yet neurotic teen-age years, when his parents’ divorce shook him to his core. The hatred of authority that made him, using “The Wanderer” as an online handle, hack into the Pentagon’s White Sands Missile Range, churned together with his growing appreciation of survivalism. Learning to shoot from his grandfather Ed; hearing his colleagues at the security guard firm where he worked mutter racial epithets while driving through inner-city Buffalo; hoping to live in a bunker; striving to get his pistol permit so he could defend himself — it all melded into an intricate but logical philosophy, with him on one side and an imposing, malevolent world on the other. As blast survivor Patti Hall told his biographers, “I think he’s a scared little kid inside.” NBC News’ John Baiata and The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
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McVeigh execution approaches
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