LITTLE ROCK (KATV) — David Shuster, a former KATV reporter who went on to star for the Fox News Channel and NBC News, is sharing his experience covering the Oklahoma City Bombing, 30 years after the homegrown terror attack that changed the nation.
April 19th, 1995, began like most days at KATV, with Channel 7 News managers, reporters, and producers gathering for a morning editorial meeting. But any plans that were made for that day were quickly upended at exactly 9:02 a.m.
“All of a sudden someone says look at CNN. And we turned it on and it looked like there had been some kind of gas explosion. Half of a building was missing,” Shuster tells KATV anchor Chris May.
Within minutes, aware of the magnitude – if not the exact details – of what had happened, Shuster and KATV photographer Carey Kelly were on their way to the airport. They wound up on board one of the last planes that was allowed to land before the airspace around Oklahoma City was closed.
They immediately headed to the blast site.
“It was horrible,” Shuster says. “There was such a frantic and desperate effort to dig through the rubble and see if there was anybody alive. And then there were worries about the building collapsing. And the firefighters having to leave the building and go back in… I’ll also never forget the rains that came after a couple of days, and feeling badly for the rescuers, and wondering if anybody could still be rescued alive.”
“It was heart-wrenching on so many levels.”
In the end, the casualty county included 168 lives lost and 850 injured.
Among the dead were 19 children.
“To sort of see some of the debris, and the shoes and the toys. It was just heart-wrenching. I mean, look, this stands to this day as the worst case of homegrown domestic terrorism in US history. And I remember at the time until 9/11 it was the largest FBI investigation in US history. The magnitude was so sort of striking.”
Former Army soldiers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were later convicted in the attack.
McVeigh was executed in 2001.
Nichols was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Both were associated with an extreme right-wing militant movement that rejected the legitimacy of the federal government and law enforcement.
“The lives lost, the white separatists, the white nationalists, all the connections with McVeigh, I just remember it being a remarkably sad and horrifying story.”
It also shattered the illusion that Americans were safe from acts of terrorism.
“These are just citizens who are just starting their day, who are just sitting down to their office jobs and then suddenly the building collapses around them and they’re literally sort of blown to bits.”
“I mean people in Oklahoma, like Arkansas, you get along, you all want to raise your kids, grow up happy regardless of your political views. But to see that people would actually have to die because a political ideology was so striking and so shocking. And I think it was perhaps the beginning of a very different era in the United States where political violence started to sort of take off. And frankly, I’m surprised there hasn’t been another Murrah Federal Building attack like that on the scale. There have been smaller attacks on abortion clinics, on IRS offices, but I’m frankly surprised we haven’t had another Oklahoma City bombing in the years since then.”
Shuster worked at KATV from 1994-1996. He’s an Emmy Award Winning broadcast journalist who currently serves as an anchor and correspondent for TYT Network’s Rebel HQ.
