The phone call from a friend came minutes after a truck bomb ripped apart the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building the spring morning of April 19, 1995.
“My God, I can’t believe this happened in Oklahoma City,” said Craig Jablonsky, a former Oklahoma native.
Jablonsky, now fifty, a former IT supervisor for Blockbuster Entertainment in McKinney, attended Mount Saint Mary High School in Oklahoma City before moving to Dallas.
The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was where Jablonsky received his driver’s license when he turned sixteen.
“When it happened, I hoped I didn’t know anyone there who was hurt or died in the explosion,” he said. “I heard supposedly someone who was injured in the bombing took off walking in a daze and showed up at my high school.”
A month after the bombing, Jablonsky learned reading Mount Saint Mary’s quarterly newsletter that someone he went to high school with had perished.
Her name was Jamie Genzer, 32, of Wellston, who worked as a loan officer in the Murrah Building at the Federal Employees Credit Union. She was married and had two children.
Although Jablonsky admits he did not know Genzer that well, he did recall her being “friendly and outgoing” whenever the two said hellos to each other in the hallways and at lunch in high school.
Jablonsky visited the memorial site where the Murrah Federal Building once stood months ago, shortly before the new museum had opened. There, he saw the bronze gold chairs, 168 of them lined up in rows; nineteen of those chairs were slightly smaller in honor of the children who died in the daycare center.
He added that the memorial in Oklahoma City is not like The Sixth Floor Museum in downtown Dallas’ Dealey Plaza; the site that was once the Texas Schoolbook Depository where it is believed alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963.
Dealey Plaza attracts hundreds of visitors daily to reflect, grieve, for a president they never met but felt a certain kind of attachment watching him on television.
“You’re sharing a common bond with most of the people who visit the memorial in Oklahoma City because most everyone there knew someone,” Jablonsky said. “It is kind of depressing and overwhelming to see all those chairs. It really puts in your mind the effect of what happened.”
It is the children I think about most whenever I dwell on what was the worst terrorist attack on American soil six years ago.
The picture that stuck in my mind most was firefighter Chris Fields cradling the body of one-year-old Baylee Almon, whose birthday had been the day before.
There is another hauntingly sad image of that fateful day that no pictures captured. It was an image prosecutors put in most, if not everyone’s mind April 24, 1997, when bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh went to trial.
They are words you can find on the website, www.kwtv.com/news/bombing/bombing-page.htm that feature all the trial transcripts.
I must admit a lump got stuck in my throat as I read Joseph Hartzler’s opening statement to the jury.
It is that same lump that is creeping up now as I write this column.
Hartzler spoke of how parents can see into the daycare center, which sits on the second floor, as they walk out of the building on the first floor.
“Children would run up to those windows and press their hands and faces to those windows to say goodbye to their parents,” he said. “And standing on the sidewalk, it was as though you can reach up and touch the children there on the second floor. But none of the parents…ever touched those children again while they were still alive.”
It sickens me to think the last possible image any of those kids had looking outside those dark-tinted windows was of the Ryder truck sitting below them that carried the bomb.
Shortly after my very brief phone interview with Jablonsky, I logged onto that bombing website again to get quotes from prosecutors and came across a section where you can see pictures of all 168 victims.
The first person I looked at was Genzer’s. I could tell from the picture, though I never met her, how young, vibrant, and beautiful she was. Then again, so were many others.
The next picture I looked at was Almon’s. I could not bring myself to look at all the other happy, smiling faces. Lives that were senselessly snuffed out by a deranged lunatic who now not only admits he blew up the Murrah Federal Building but expresses no remorse for what he has done as his execution date draws nearer.
Many people have different images of what happened in Oklahoma City. For me, it is the image of the children that will forever be etched in my mind.
For Jablonsky, it is something else. When he visited the memorial that day, he took note of one bronze gold chair.
It was the one for Jamie Genzer's Sitting on top her chair was a teddy bear left there by one of her two children.
©4/25/01
“My God, I can’t believe this happened in Oklahoma City,” said Craig Jablonsky, a former Oklahoma native.
Jablonsky, now fifty, a former IT supervisor for Blockbuster Entertainment in McKinney, attended Mount Saint Mary High School in Oklahoma City before moving to Dallas.
The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was where Jablonsky received his driver’s license when he turned sixteen.
“When it happened, I hoped I didn’t know anyone there who was hurt or died in the explosion,” he said. “I heard supposedly someone who was injured in the bombing took off walking in a daze and showed up at my high school.”
A month after the bombing, Jablonsky learned reading Mount Saint Mary’s quarterly newsletter that someone he went to high school with had perished.
 |
| Jamie Genzer |
Although Jablonsky admits he did not know Genzer that well, he did recall her being “friendly and outgoing” whenever the two said hellos to each other in the hallways and at lunch in high school.
Jablonsky visited the memorial site where the Murrah Federal Building once stood months ago, shortly before the new museum had opened. There, he saw the bronze gold chairs, 168 of them lined up in rows; nineteen of those chairs were slightly smaller in honor of the children who died in the daycare center.
He added that the memorial in Oklahoma City is not like The Sixth Floor Museum in downtown Dallas’ Dealey Plaza; the site that was once the Texas Schoolbook Depository where it is believed alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963.
Dealey Plaza attracts hundreds of visitors daily to reflect, grieve, for a president they never met but felt a certain kind of attachment watching him on television.
“You’re sharing a common bond with most of the people who visit the memorial in Oklahoma City because most everyone there knew someone,” Jablonsky said. “It is kind of depressing and overwhelming to see all those chairs. It really puts in your mind the effect of what happened.”
It is the children I think about most whenever I dwell on what was the worst terrorist attack on American soil six years ago.
The picture that stuck in my mind most was firefighter Chris Fields cradling the body of one-year-old Baylee Almon, whose birthday had been the day before.
There is another hauntingly sad image of that fateful day that no pictures captured. It was an image prosecutors put in most, if not everyone’s mind April 24, 1997, when bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh went to trial.
They are words you can find on the website, www.kwtv.com/news/bombing/bombing-page.htm that feature all the trial transcripts.
I must admit a lump got stuck in my throat as I read Joseph Hartzler’s opening statement to the jury.
It is that same lump that is creeping up now as I write this column.
Hartzler spoke of how parents can see into the daycare center, which sits on the second floor, as they walk out of the building on the first floor.
“Children would run up to those windows and press their hands and faces to those windows to say goodbye to their parents,” he said. “And standing on the sidewalk, it was as though you can reach up and touch the children there on the second floor. But none of the parents…ever touched those children again while they were still alive.”
It sickens me to think the last possible image any of those kids had looking outside those dark-tinted windows was of the Ryder truck sitting below them that carried the bomb.
Shortly after my very brief phone interview with Jablonsky, I logged onto that bombing website again to get quotes from prosecutors and came across a section where you can see pictures of all 168 victims.
The first person I looked at was Genzer’s. I could tell from the picture, though I never met her, how young, vibrant, and beautiful she was. Then again, so were many others.
The next picture I looked at was Almon’s. I could not bring myself to look at all the other happy, smiling faces. Lives that were senselessly snuffed out by a deranged lunatic who now not only admits he blew up the Murrah Federal Building but expresses no remorse for what he has done as his execution date draws nearer.
Many people have different images of what happened in Oklahoma City. For me, it is the image of the children that will forever be etched in my mind.
For Jablonsky, it is something else. When he visited the memorial that day, he took note of one bronze gold chair.
It was the one for Jamie Genzer's Sitting on top her chair was a teddy bear left there by one of her two children.
©4/25/01
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