On the morning of April 19, 1995, Rev. Wayne Robinson was busy at home in Oklahoma City, working on a sermon he was to deliver the following Sunday at Channing Unitarian Universalist Church in nearby Edmond.
It was then he heard a sound that, although he didn’t know it at the time, would be associated with one the nation’s most notorious events.
“I heard a loud sound, so I went outside, and at the house next door, there was a man working on the roof,” said Robinson, 63, who moved to East Lansing last August to serve as the interim minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lansing, located at 855 Grove St. in East Lansing.
“I said, ‘What did you think that was? And he said, ‘It must have been a jet breaking the sound barrier.’”
Robinson later walked back inside.
And he heard news he would never forget.
A classical music station playing on his radio was interrupted to tell locals of the now-infamous Oklahoma City bombing, an act that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, claiming the lives of men, women and children - 168 total - and injuring more than 500 others.
“So I went back outside,” Robinson recalls.
“But this time I could see way out in the distance some smoke rising up.”
After making telephone calls, he drove some 10 miles to the site of the disaster, where he found the destroyed building corded off.
“It was a massive explosion,” he said. “It was a tall, big building. And it was totally destroyed.”
Robinson joined with other area ministers to distribute food and supplies to workers in the area. The Unitarian Universalist Church in Oklahoma City, on 13th Street, had its windows blown out from the blast that occurred on Fourth Street.
Within a day, the impact of the bombing became clearer as dust settled over the site.
Now, more than six years after the worst terrorist act ever to occur on United States soil, Timothy McVeigh is slated to be put to death for his role in the bombing. His execution will take place May 16 at a prison in Terre Haute, Ind.
The blast took the lives of many - and forever haunts the lives of numerous others.
Robinson lost a close friend who was a member of the Secret Service, and two members of Unitarian Universalist Church in Oklahoma City.
“He had just turned down a promotion to Washington, D.C., because he was divorcing and wanted to stay with his kids,” Robinson said of his friend. “I had a lot of acquaintances and members of the church that had friends involved. It was almost impossible not to be connected to someone.”
And those sad sentiments carried forward into the church’s Sunday service following the bombing.
Church members read the names of friend, victims. A list of all the victims was printed, silent meditation occurred and uplifting music filled the church.
Soon after, McVeigh, an impassioned conservative and former U.S. soldier who grew up in Pendleton, N.Y., was charged with the bombing.
“This was not a monster,” Robinson says. “McVeigh was a red, white and blue patriot. He fought for us in Desert Storm, and was a product of our schools and society - and he did this.
“We like to demonize people who do bad things, and make them seem differently than everybody, but this was a clean-cut young soldier who was admired and commended for his leadership.”
In 1997, McVeigh was convicted of eight counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges.
He was later sentenced to die by lethal injection. Hundreds of friends and relatives of victims have already requested to watch McVeigh die, and a judge considered airing the execution on television.
Survivors and victims’ families will be allowed to watch the execution, via closed-circuit, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced earlier this month.
But the execution - which is less than three weeks away - won’t help provide closure for the families of the victims, Robinson said.
“I think the more important closure is when the guilty party is found, and the guilty party is sentenced,” he said. “What is going on now is based on revenge. I don’t think it will help give closure.”
Robinson says the idea of a death penalty is troubling for him, citing that the United States is the only large industrialized nation that still practices such a form of punishment.
He insists that to have a government-sponsored killing in retribution for killing only adds to the “wrong that has been done.”
“I am in favor of justice,” Robinson says. “But I don’t think that should include killing.”
Since the Oklahoma City bombing, there’s been other major violent acts that have captured the attention of Americans nationwide.
There’s been the high school shootings - such as the one at Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., where several students were killed.
Others have followed, including the fatal school-shooting of a young girl more than a year ago in Mt. Morris Township, Mich.
But few have forgotten Oklahoma City.
Even MSU has memorialized the victims, hosting a memorial quilt - roughly 12 feet tall and 15 feet wide displaying the names of victims - which hung in the Administration Building for two months last year.
The quilt was displayed in numerous buildings, but MSU was the only university to play host.
“The bombing was a tragedy, not simply for the individuals and families, but for a nation,” said MSU Provost Lou Anna Simon, who spoke at the unveiling last April. “Because in my personal view, violence is never a solution to political issues.”
Robinson agrees.
Amidst the rubble, the minister said the country has learned valuable lessons from Oklahoma City.
“The whole idea of intolerance, whether political or religious intolerance, is just destructive to the body politic,” said Robinson, a 25-year resident of Oklahoma. “I think every group has intolerant persons in it. When you think that you alone are right and everyone else is wrong it breeds the kind of righteousness that allows you to do almost anything in the name of your cause.
“That can be terribly destructive.”
McVeigh has admitted the bombing was retribution for the actions the FBI used in ending the standoff in Waco, Texas, which resulted in the death of David Koresh and 80 followers of the Branch Dividians.
The date of that incident was April 19, 1993, exactly two years before a bomb ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
“This was a veteran, a military man, a very patriotic right-wing man and he took things into his own hands,” said Robinson, of McVeigh’s retaliation.
Since the bombing, Robinson has moved on to serve as a minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ft. Myers, Fla.
He’ll return to Ft. Myers to begin a new Unitarian congregation and rejoin his wife, Jacqueline, after his tenure in the Lansing area is complete this summer.
But wherever he goes, Robinson shares his experience living just down the road from the site of the nation’s most notorious terrorism act - whether in his sermons or speaking with friends and those he meets. The constant news coverage of the bombing and the trials have served as reminders of the event.
“There was a certain time when it was very much a part of my everyday life,” Robinson says.
“On a Wednesday morning, I’ve got a sore throat, I’m thinking about myself and suddenly something so beyond comprehension happens - that an American can do that to fellow Americans and young children.”
