April 19, 1995, 30 years ago: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma is destroyed by a car bomb, resulting in the deaths of 168 people. (The building was named for a federal judge from Oklahoma.)
The bombing was carried out at 9:02 AM, by Timothy McVeigh, a 27-year-old native of the Buffalo area, who had fallen in with right-wing extremist groups like the Michigan Militia.
He chose the date because it was the anniversary of the start of the American Revolution (by some people's reckoning), the Battle of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775. But he had a 2nd reason: April 19 was also the anniversary of the end of the Waco Siege 2 years earlier, when the federal government moved in to arrest David Koresh for his crimes at Waco, Texas. He chose the location because he believed the order had come from the Murrah Federal Building.
The building before, from 1977 to 1995
McVeigh was captured 2 days later. He was convicted in 1997. On June 11, 2001, he became the 1st prisoner executed by the federal government since 1963.
He was assisted in the bombing by Terry Nichols, a 40-year-old Michigan native that he had met while in the U.S. Army. Nicholas was sentenced to life imprisonment at ADX Florence, the "supermax" federal prison in Colorado.
Three months after that, their act was no longer the greatest act of terrorism, or of mass murder, perpetrated in America. But it remains the greatest act of domestic terrorism.
And the perpetrators weren't black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or Arab: They were white. They weren't immigrants: They were native-born. They weren't Muslim: They identified as Christian. And they weren't Spanish speakers, or Arabic speakers: They spoke only English.
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