Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Yet if David’s mood that Sunday morning had been more crafty, or if he’d been in one of his frequent troughs of self-doubt, he just might have submitted to a nonviolent approach by law enforcement officials, especially if some of the local police he knew and liked had been included in the posse. He was a complex man, with many sides to his personality.

  But at the moment, all this was mere conjecture. We had to attend to more urgent matters, such as caring for our wounded and counting our dead.

  My first thought was for Michele and the kids. Hurrying upstairs, I found the hallway filled with mothers and children huddling on the floor. The women had tucked the youngsters under their bodies to protect them from the gunfire. I found Michele and the kids where I’d left them in a corner of the room. The children seemed okay, the twins cuddling close to their mother, Serenity beside them. But the tears in Michele’s eyes told me how shaken she was. In her short life she’d been through so much, and it wasn’t over.

  I bumped into Jaime as I was going downstairs. He told me he had a rifle but said he hadn’t fired it. “The friggin’ thing jammed as I was trying to out a round in the chamber,” he told me. He was dressed in black and wore one of the tactical ammo vests, an item of Koresh Survival Wear.

  “I look like the ATF,” he joked. “Lucky one of our guys didn’t off me.” His eyes were stunned yet shining, shock muting the exhilaration of having lived through extreme danger.

  In the next few hours I began to hear what had happened to our casualties and to some of the other people who’d lived through that terrifying morning.

  I didn’t know if Perry had died from his wounds, or if he’d killed himself, or if he’d gotten one of the guys to put him out of his suffering. Kathy Schroeder later claimed that Neal Vaega killed Perry as an act of mercy and that she heard David give Neal permission to do this. Perry’s body was preserved from damage during the fire because we buried him beneath the dirt floor of the tornado shelter, and the official autopsy reported that Perry was killed by a single bullet wound fired point-blank into his mouth. But all those autopsies are suspect. Stored in a faulty cooler at the Fort Worth medical examiner’s office, Perry’s exhumed body partially decomposed before examination.

  I learned more about how Winston Blake had died. A big man in his late twenties, a baker by trade, Winston, whose family came from the Caribbean, hated the cold. That damp, chilly morning he had been wearing a couple of sweaters, three pairs of pants, one of our “David Koresh/God Rocks” T-shirts, and a black ammo vest with the Koresh Survival Wear logo. Apparently, he was just sitting on his bunk, eating a breakfast of French toast, when the bullets crashed through the water tanks outside his window. One of them hit him under his right ear, and he fell forward into the water from the ruptured tanks puddling on the floor, lying in a pool of water and blood, as I’d seen him.

  Later, the ATF tried to disclaim responsibility for Winston’s murder. They asserted that the autopsy showed that Winston had been killed by one of us, perhaps because in his black ammo vest he’d been mistaken for a federal agent. They said his wound showed traces of powder burns, which proved he was shot at close range. However, a doctor with the Manchester, England, police who later examined Winston’s body found that Winston’s injury could have been covered up by a subsequent point-blank shot to make it seem as if we’d killed him. And he found no powder burns.

  Apart from Perry Jones and Winston Blake, we had three other fatalities, and several wounded, inside Mount Carmel. The dead included Peter Gent, Jaydean Wendell, and Peter Hipsman. Twenty-four-year-old Peter Gent was killed in the empty water tower, hit by a bullet fired from one of the hovering helicopters, or maybe by a shot coming from the snipers hidden behind the cement block shed where our motorbikes were stored, two hundred yards to the east of the main building. (After the cease-fire, these snipers pulled back to a hay barn on the neighboring farm.) Peter was working inside the tower when the attack began, chipping away at the rust. Standing on scaffolding and ladders set up inside the tank, he’d stuck his head and upper body out of the hatch at the top of the tower to see what was going on and was hit in the chest. He was unarmed.

  My friend Peter Hipsman was in David’s bedroom at the top of the four-story residential tower when the gunmen in the helicopters blasted it with gunfire. He was struck in the side, the bullet passed through his body, and he fell to the floor in agony. After the cease-fire, when Steve found him, Peter begged to be put out of his misery. David and Steve refused at first; but then, seeing that Peter’s wound was fatal, and that he was in terrible pain, Steve sent Neal Vaega to shoot him twice in the head. In this sad way, Peter, who loved to entertain the kids with wacky imitations of Donald Duck, ended his life. He, too, was unarmed.

  In their desperate postraid media spin, the ATF tried to claim that Peter had shot at them through the roof of the tower room. But the evidence was clearly to the contrary. When I went up there I saw a series of holes in the ceiling, maybe as many as a dozen, and the dry-wall was hanging down, showing clearly that the bullets had come in from above, not the other way around. Later, several reputable Texas attorneys with military experience confirmed this fact; they stated that, in their view, the shots could only have come from the sky. And a video taken by a camera crew from station KWTX-TV clearly suggests that the trajectory of the bullets fired through the tower roof was downward.

  Jaydean Wendell, our fifth fatality, had responded to the ATF assault with all the instincts of the police officer she’d once been in her native Hawaii. When the firing started Jaydean had just finished breast-feeding her ten-month-old baby, Patron. Seizing a rifle, she ran to her second-floor room, climbed onto a bunk bed, and returned the raiders’ fire. After the cease-fire, Marjorie Thomas, who’d been caring for some of Jaydean’s children, found her sprawled on the bunk, a bullet in her skull.

  We reckoned our casualties at five dead and four wounded, including David, Judy Schneider, who was wounded in the hand and shoulder, Scott Sonobe, and David Jones, who got a bullet in his buttocks. We were amazed that with all that gunfire so few had been hurt.

  David’s wounds were the worst. He lay on blankets in the hallway upstairs, close to where he’d been shot. He was now shaking and semiconscious, moving in and out of pain, his eyes rolling up into his head. He was deathly pale, and his glasses were misty with fevered sweat. One of the women, a trained nurse, said his blood pressure was very low, but even in his delirium David refused any medication, including aspirin. In his lucid moments he turned down the medical attention the federal negotiators were offering, saying he was in God’s hands. We all thought he was going to die, and the gloom was deep. If David died we all died—in spirit, and maybe in the flesh—fighting to the end.

  Seeing David in that condition, my mind seemed to slip into an eternal rather than a temporal perspective. I felt I was living in a separate reality, ready to put my life on the line for my faith. It was a heady feeling, yet underneath this spurt of exhilaration the notion that David was dying sucked at the pit of my stomach.

  To our amazement, however, David miraculously recovered. We’d thought his wound was fatal, but an hour or so later he sat proudly showing off the ugly gash in his side, asking for his guitar. “They don’t kill me that easy,” he whispered to me, winking. He even felt chipper enough to call his mother, Bonnie Haldeman, and leave a cheery-tragic message on her answering machine: “Hello, Mama, it’s your boy. They shot me and I’m dying, all right? But I’ll be back real soon, okay? I’m sorry you didn’t learn the Seals, but I’ll be merciful, okay? I’ll see y’all in the skies.”

  I’ll see y’all in the skies.

  That phrase resonated in my head as I sat on my bunk that damp day, trying to absorb everything that had happened in the hours since Robert had arrived with the newspaper. Images tumbled around my mind, colors and shapes whirling without sense and order. The scene that kept recurring was the view of Winston in his “David Koresh/God Rocks” T-shirt lying in a pool of blood
and water, having lost his life while munching on French toast.

  What did that last bite of toast taste like as it hit his taste buds? I wondered, trying to imagine the clotted tang of egg and the sugary sweetness of the sodden bread in my own throat. “I don’t want to be eating French toast when I die,” I told Steve when he stuck his head into my doorway to see if I was okay.

  He looked at me solemnly for a moment, trying to gauge my state of mind. “We’re all toast now, Thibodeau,” he said.

  11

  AFTERSHOCK

  When Steve moved on I wandered through the building listening to other people’s accounts of their experiences during the assault. Most were still in shock, their eyes stunned with the enormity of what had just taken place. Despite our premonitions about our spiritual fate, nothing could have prepared us for the terrors of that day, those traumatic fifty minutes of gunfire.

  Seventy-seven-year-old Catherine Matteson had been downstairs when she saw the ATF cattle trailers coming down the road. As she hurried to her upstairs room, her ears were deafened by the choppers’ roar. She saw three helicopters zooming toward the top of the residential tower in a V-formation, firing as they came, the yellow flashes spurting like venom. Terrified, she fell to the floor, following the same survival instinct as me—get as close as possible to the bosom of Mother Earth.

  “All hell broke loose and everyone at the front of the building started shooting,” Catherine said. After her first panic, she and Margaret Kiyoko Hayashi Lawson, a small, elderly Japanese Hawaiian, gathered some of the children together. The windows were shattered by gunfire, and the two women tried to shield the kids with their bodies. Later, as she went down the second-floor corridor after the cease-fire, Catherine saw shot-out windows and shattered blinds in every room, the razorlike glass shards scattered everywhere.

  The ATF later accused farsighted Catherine and aged Margaret of using firearms “to commit the violent crimes of murder and attempted murder.” Yet even the ATF affidavit described Margaret as “probably the most harmless woman around.”

  Like Catherine and Margaret, Victorine Hollingsworth, a middle-aged Caribbean woman from Guyana, tried to protect the children, despite her bad leg, very poor eyesight, and high blood pressure. She had the kids in her care put on their shoes and get dressed. Seeing the cattle trailers pull up to the front of the building and the armed agents jumping out, she ran into the corridor with the children and lay down on the floor while the air rocked with explosions. A simple woman, she called rifles “long guns” and pistols “short guns,” and she heard plenty of both sounding off in the next ninety minutes.

  Kathy Schroeder was dressing her son, Bryan, when shots came through the window of their room. Mother and son dropped to the floor and slid under a bed, both weeping and scared. They huddled there in terror for two hours, fearful of emerging even after the shooting stopped. Sita Sonobe’s experience was even more scary. “My kids were in the bunk bed,” she recalled. “All of a sudden these guys came out of that trailer and just start shooting. The bed is full of holes.” She was still amazed at the enormity of the day’s events. “If they know there are children, how come they just come out of the trailer and shoot?” she demanded.

  One of Julie Martinez’s daughters was fired at when, urged by a child’s curiosity, she went to window to see what all the commotion was about. “They just started shooting at her,” Julie said. Another daughter was almost killed. “A bullet went, like, six inches from her head,” Julie told us. Other bullets came up through the floor, close to her four-year-old son, Isaiah. “I think it had to be God that kept that bullet from going through the carpet, because other bullets did go through,” she said.

  Wayne’s wife, Sheila Martin, was in the chapel with two of her older daughters when Perry Jones warned her that the feds were on the way. Sheila took her family upstairs for safety. Standing at the window before the attack, she combed the hair of her six-year-old son, Daniel, while four-year-old Kimmie tried to dress herself. Sheila’s son Jamie, stricken with meningitis, blind and crippled, lay on a loveseat under the window.

  Teenager Rachel Sylvia ran into the room. “Look! They’re coming!” she exclaimed, then fled. Sheila saw the agents running toward the front door, which was directly below her. Hearing gunshots, she pulled her kids down to the floor and kneeled beside them while bullets smashed the window. As glass showered the room, Jamie started screaming, but Sheila had to keep her head low under the barrage and couldn’t get to him. Racked by worry, she hunkered down with Daniel and Kimmie. A pause in the gunfire gave her the chance to collect Jamie from the loveseat, only to find that the boy had been cut above the left eye by flying glass fragments.

  The collective shock suffered by the children during the raid was most touchingly revealed in the crayon drawings done by the kids who were sent out of Mount Carmel after that day. Many of these sketches show hovering choppers firing bullets that made holes in the roof. With their naive, comic book–like simplicity, these crayon pictures rendered a mixture of childish excitement and deep fright. More than any one thing, they summed up the shattering experience we all went through during those few catastrophic hours.

  The stories kept coming in, creating a crazy quilt of ragged recollections.

  Graeme Craddock was washing his clothes early Sunday morning, around the time ATF agent Robert Rodriguez arrived to show us the Waco newspaper. He’d joined the group in the foyer to hear what the paper had to say about Marc Breault, his fellow Aussie. After David Jones arrived, Graeme was about to go back to his laundry when Peter Hipsman stopped him and told him the attack was coming. Graeme went to his room, collected his AR-15 rifle and 9mm pistol, donned an ammo vest, and went to the window. He was standing there watching the roadway when David came by and told him that no one was to open fire unless he gave the signal.

  Though he seemed ready for battle, Graeme was hardly a ferocious type. Skinny and short, a quiet guy, pale-skinned for an Aussie, he’d been a high-school physics teacher in his homeland. A year or so earlier, when Steve phoned him in Australia and told him to return to Mount Carmel, he’d come willingly, like the devout, obedient soul he was. Since he’d been trained as electrical engineer, he’d overseen the installation of the wiring in Mount Carmel.

  Graeme remembered that David had told him that, when the attack came, one of several scenarios could occur: We’d get “translated,” arrested, or killed. When the shooting started, Graeme forgot his weaponry and hit the deck until it was over.*

  Brad Branch, in contrast, was no wimp. A big guy, an aviation mechanic from Waco, he grooved on honky-tonks and topless bars, moving back and forth between the worldly and the religious life, between sin and remorse. During the attack he ran from room to room carrying a rifle. I never saw him firing his weapon, but Victorine Hollingsworth later testified that she heard Brad boast about shooting an agent.

  But in all charity, no one could claim that Victorine’s mind was completely clear. She’d been brought up in poverty in the Caribbean. “My childhood was very sad and painful, only sickness and death I see,” she said in her singsong, West Indian lilt. Apart from her bad leg, weak eyes, and elevated blood pressure, she was given to weird dreams that were almost parodies of David’s visions. As a young girl she’d dreamed of a “beautiful young lady laying on the sky with all the light lying around her.” The “beautiful lady,” Victorine believed, was the Heavenly Mother. When she heard David speak on a visit to England, she thought he was the “King David we read about in the Word,” and she followed him to Mount Carmel.

  In reporting Brad’s supposed boast about shooting an agent, Victorine used nearly the same words—“He nearly got me, but I got him first”—to describe what she also claimed to have heard from Livingston Fagan. Having known both men well, it’s hardly plausible to me that the skinny, saintly Livingston and the beefy, raunchy Brad would use identical language to describe their actions.

  An ATF agent claimed that Livingston and a couple of other
men had pinned him down with gunfire, but his identification was totally suspect. I was told by several people who saw him that Livingston was kneeling in prayer in the chapel while the bullets were flying. (Despite his current forty-year sentence, Livingston himself refuses to deny or confirm any involvement in the firefight. “We were all of the same spirit in there,” he told an interviewer, “so why should I talk about differences about what we did in the flesh?”)

  Other stories were added to the narrative of the day.

  Renos Avraam, it appeared, had hidden behind a safe in Perry Jones’s office. Later, he was convicted of shooting a federal agent on the testimony of a convicted dope dealer he shared a cell with after April 19. The convict claimed that Renos had bragged, “Well, I’m not a bad shot,” when asked if he’d fired at any of the agents attacking us. However, there was no direct evidence whatever that Special Agent Robert Williams, killed while giving covering fire to the attackers on Mount Carmel’s roof, had been shot by Renos or anyone else inside the building. Maybe Renos was showing off to his hard-case cellmate; but from everything I knew about him, he seemed more likely to huddle in a dark corner than to come out shooting.

  Kevin Whitecliff, a big man who’d been a prison guard in Hawaii, was later accused of firing at the agents who were shooting at us from the helicopters. Maybe he did, and I wouldn’t blame him. As his counsel later said, he did what he had to do to defend himself.