April 19th, 1995
How quickly we forget. Tomorrow marks the 15th anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I still remember where I was and what I was doing on that morning. Ironically there were crews that came from New York City to assist in the recovery effort in the days following that tragedy.
Not long after the remainder of the building was imploded I made a visit to the site. A cyclone fence surrounded the lot where the building once stood. There were all kinds of flowers, notes, and stuffed animals attached to the fence out of respect for those who perished in the building. One particular visual image still stands out to me. Spray painted in bold black letters on an adjacent building was the following phrase: We will not forget…
Unfortunately most of us do forget. But not everyone…. Chaplain Jack Poe has served the Oklahoma City Police Dept. on a fulltime basis for as long as I can remember. He was there for the citizens of Oklahoma City and for his officers that day. Tomorrow will be a hard day for him. Another friend of mine is a counselor in a nearby city in Oklahoma. She was called upon to assist with death notifications and crisis counseling in the days immediately following the bombing. Crisis counseling at that time was not the focus of her practice, but it is today. She specializes in counseling emergency responders who have been through highly traumatic events. The bombing totally transformed the direction of her career. April 19th will also be forever etched on her mind.
After the Oklahoma City Memorial was completed, I took my boys to see it. I wanted them to be aware of an important event that affected our neighbors and friends. It was a solemn experience for all of us. I stressed to the boys that there were small children in a daycare facility who were among the victims. In fact, 19 children were among the 168 people who perished that day.
I am thinking about all of the families tonight who were impacted by the event. I am thinking in particular about a number of colleagues who assisted at the scene for days on end. You may recall that it was an alert trooper with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol who stopped Timothy McVeigh on a routine traffic stop on the interstate. I am thinking about that trooper this evening as well. I hope we can live up to the spray painted phrase I saw that day…We will never forget…