Waco

by David Thibodeau

  The charred corpse of six-year-old Star, David’s oldest daughter, was found with her spine bent into a backward bow until her head almost touched her feet. Her muscles were contracted by the combined effect of the fire’s heat and the cyanide in her body, a byproduct of CS suffocation. Cyanide contraction is so violent it can break bones, which is why prison death-chamber officials who use the gas strap their victims down.

  One expert later said that the CS “would have panicked the children. Their eyes would have involuntarily shut. Their skin would have been burning. They would have been gasping for air and coughing wildly. Eventually, they would have been overcome with vomiting in a final hell.” The official forensic dental report included this terrible detail: “There was a particular instance where all that remained was the arm and hand of a mother clasping a small child’s hand and [the] remains of an arm. You could see how tightly the child’s hand was being squeezed by the mother.”

  David was dead, killed by gunfire, along with more than twenty others who’d been shot, including Steve Schneider. David was found with Steve Schneider and David Jones in the telephone room. The coroner decided that David died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. All of David’s women and all of his children perished in the fire. Two fetuses, one full-term, the other seven months, were reflexively stillborn as their mothers, Aisha Gyarfas and Nicole Gent, died.

  I heard that Zilla Henry’s husband, Sam, watched the disaster on TV in Nottingham, England, praying for his wife and four children. Wayne’s four-year-old son, Daniel, watched it in his grandmother’s house in New Jersey. “I saw it burning,” he said in his child’s voice. “How could they bear the pain and pain and pain? Burned to nothing, just bones.” Edna Doyle, Clive’s mother, said: “I consider I’m the living dead.”

  The Israeli mother of my friend Pablo Cohen, herself a survivor of the Nazi death camps, said that never in her worst nightmares did she expect her son to die by gassing and incineration in America.

  Finally, I was alone in a cell. The guards offered me food, but even after weeks of semistarvation I wasn’t hungry. I just needed to think. I sat on the hard cement floor, hugging my knees in the dark, and tried to calm my mind, to consider the bare facts.

  Nine of us had survived; seventy-four were dead (seventy-six, if you count the two stillborn babies; eighty-two, if you include the six who died on February 28). Four of the nine survivors were in the hospital, a deputy had told me, including Clive Doyle, who needed skin grafts for the burns on his hands. Marjorie Thomas, the British woman who’d jumped off the roof in flames, was in critical condition, on a respirator. The doctors feared her face would be permanently disfigured.

  Sitting in the reception area that first evening after my escape from the fire, waiting for the deputies to assign me to a cell, I watched Attorney General Reno on Larry King Live. She claimed the FBI had “hard evidence” that our kids were being beaten—which was the reason why she allowed the feds to burn them! The logic of this escaped me, and I wanted to throw a brick through the damn TV. “More lies!” I shouted, but no one took notice.

  It made me furious that the feds were using our children, even in their deaths, as a pretext to condemn the people who’d loved them and been killed trying to protect them. The FBI even denied that David working on his manuscript, something I’d seen him do with my own eyes. The media spin was so powerful, it even began to twist my mind. Talk about brainwashing!

  “Some religious fanatics murdered themselves,” President Clinton declared, but he was wrong. The truth is that a religious community that threatened or harmed no one was brutally destroyed by agents of the U.S. government in broad daylight, watched by the world. The FBI assault on Mount Carmel was one of the most violent episodes of official religious persecution in U.S. history. All these official distortions of the truth were an early warning to me that the world outside had more or less made up its mind that we were merely a bunch of religious maniacs who’d murdered ourselves. I knew then that I would have an uphill fight trying to counter that perception.

  In the days following the tragedy something weird happened: Reno became a heroine. Suddenly she was a media star. “STANDING TALL: THE CAPITAL IS ALL AGOG AT ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OUTSPOKEN HONESTY,” Time magazine crowed. “RENO’S POPULARITY RISES FROM ASHES OF DISASTER,” the New York Times reported.

  Unlike Reno, McLellan County Sheriff Jack Harwell, later interviewed on PBS’s Frontline, wept when he recalled his anguish over the tragedy. Harwell said that many FBI officials were shocked that no one came out. That included Byron Sage, who was also upset when interviewed on Frontline.

  Sitting in my jail cell, listening to Reno being crowned Queen of the Moment, I was stunned. With the screams of my suffocating, scorched friends and the moans of the kids I knew and loved echoing in my ears, I wondered at the ways of the world. How could this woman, who had ordered her cohorts to destroy us, be hailed as Superstar? If David Koresh had been the object of such adulation, it would have been seen as a symptom of brainwashing. Instead of mourning our tragedy, Americans just seemed relieved that somebody out there had taken responsibility for the terrible decision that ended in our obliteration.

  It was baffling—and saddening. Hearing paeans of praise for a high official who’d been grossly manipulated by darker minds made my heart sink. Truly, Babylon was upon us with all its monstrosities, as David had predicted.

  Months later I came across an old column by Mickey Kaus in New Republic that made me realize that others were also puzzled by Reno’s amazing post-Waco popularity. “Am I alone in thinking there’s something perverse, even a bit obscene, about the current lionization of Attorney General Janet Reno?” Kaus asked plaintively. “She made a disastrous decision that resulted in the loss of more than seventy lives. In a bizarre bit of political alchemy, this somehow protected her from suffering any of the consequences that normally attend disastrously handled responsibilities. Far from restoring accountability, Reno seems to have hit on the formula for avoiding it. Make a dreadful mistake? Go immediately on ‘Nightline.’ Say the buck stops with you. Recount in moving terms the agony of your decision. And watch your polls rise.”

  Another perspective comes from attorney David B. Kopel and criminologist Paul H. Blackman, authors of No More Wacos. Though Kopel and Blackman are associated with the National Rifle Association, I think their comments are valid: “There is perhaps no institution in the United States government with more unchecked power than the Department of Justice. The job of attorney general is therefore one of the most difficult in the entire cabinet. It cannot be performed effectively by an attorney general who looks the other way at misconduct by her own employees. Nor can it be performed effectively by an attorney general who, having been deceived into approving a plan which directly led to the unnecessary death of seventy-six persons, fails to discipline a single one of the persons who deceived her.”

  After the fire, a charred copy of the Fourth Amendment was found in Mount Carmel’s ashes: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. Or as Jack Zimmerman told Congress: “In America we don’t kill them first then try them.” Shulamit Cohen, Pablo’s mother, wrote about her son in a letter to Zimmerman: “I thought he’d be safe in America.” In the end, thinking about those last days, I can only echo Clive Doyle’s comment: “If they thought we were a bunch of crazies, why did they drive us to the limit?”

  To this day, Reno has never apologized for her horrible mistake. But to give the woman her due, she had the grace to say, a year or so later: “I will never forget Waco. The ghost of Waco will be with me all my life.”

  Lord, I hope so!

  Those ghosts certainly haunt me, and I only lived through the experience. She made the whole thing happen.

  My mood surprised me. I was in shock but somehow at peace. I felt the presence of those who’d died, and the kids’ faces haunted me. But the growing tension
s of the long siege, and all the pressure of hostile forces squeezing my soul, were at last released. Having survived, I felt that no further harm could touch me.

  Gary Richardson, the attorney who offered to represent me, was amazed at my serenity when I saw him the next day. I was on my way to court to be arraigned, along with four other survivors, including my friends Jaime Castillo and Renos Avraam. Richardson told the press that “David Thibodeau’s more at peace with himself than most people I know.” My court visit was short, and I came out as I went in, in shackles, held as a material witness, as there was no evidence I’d ever shot at anyone. Jaime, though, was in serious trouble; he was charged with conspiracy to murder federal agents.

  My mother was aching to see me, but the deputies, for reasons of their own, wouldn’t let her in for several days.

  Before that, however, I read about her in a newspaper. “I can’t wait to be in the same room with him and hear his voice in my ears and feel his hand in mine,” she told a reporter, and I could almost hear her warm, emotional voice vibrating through the newsprint. Speaking of having seen Kathy Schroeder, one of the Mount Carmel women who’d come out during the siege, being brought shackled into court, my mother said: “This lovely, petite, absolutely despondent young woman walks through the door in that hideous outfit in those chains, and I could just see my son, my tall, golden son, coming through that door. It was nightmarish.”

  When my mother was finally allowed a visit, her expressive blue eyes were charged with tears. “Are you sure you’re okay, Davey?” she kept asking, distrusting my assurances. She touched my scorched nose and cheek and winced for me, even though I assured her it hurt no worse than a bad sunburn.

  I read an account of the smoking ruin of Mount Carmel in Friday’s Waco Tribune-Herald. The day before, reporters had been allowed to visit the site, three days after the fire. “Death paraded in front of us Thursday on Double EE Ranch Road,” reporter Mark England wrote. “Two men in camouflage suits toted a black bag, bowed in the middle, down the hill that falls away from what was once Mount Carmel.” England continued: “This day it was as quiet as a silent prayer. The Texas wind whipped the bright orange flags marking the bodies and carried the stench elsewhere.”

  England went on to describe the ruin of the concrete vault where so many children and their mothers were suffocated and burned to death; the two charred bodies found on the smashed-in roof; and the smoke that still hovered over the rubble. He described David’s black ’68 Camaro, still intact, “its back lifted up like a scorpion [’s tail]”; the red and purple Jet Ski resting near the lake; and the upturned white hull of our bass-fishing boat stuck up on the hill like a beached Noah’s Ark. Bodies were buried in the ashes, charred into icons of human horror.

  Contemplating this scene of mute devastation, England recalled meeting Koresh five years earlier, “a polite young man trying to meld rock ’n’ roll and religion.” When someone called him a prophet, David rebuked him, saying he just taught the Bible.

  Reading this sad story, I wondered if England, who’d coauthored the sensationalist Waco Tribune-Herald series that ran right when the ATF attacked us, had the least twinge of conscience about the part his skewed, even vicious journalism had played in the disaster. “Memories are all that is left of Mount Carmel,” he ended, and I marveled at the mentality that could be simultaneously so guilty and so sanctimonious.

  One TV image I saw during those first days stuck in my mind. At daybreak on the morning of the final assault, just as the tanks were crashing into Mount Carmel, a group of black cows went on grazing peacefully in the middle distance. It reminded me of a poem I read in school, about a farmer calmly plowing his field while in the background a mythical winged man was drowning in the sea.

  I was moved from cell to cell for several days, sharing space first with other prisoners. Jail was like a luxurious hotel after Mount Carmel. I’d had nothing but rainwater sponge baths for almost two months, and the prison diet was haute cuisine after those endless MREs. I got one hate letter from a Mr. Thibodeau in Springfield, Massachusetts, who accused me of disgracing the family name (no return address); otherwise, I had no personal trouble in the slammer.

  For a while I was put back in my own cell. The reason for this came clear when the deputies brought in Louis Alaniz, the Pentecostal who’d sneaked into Mount Carmel during the siege. “So, did you set the fire?” Louis asked bluntly, obviously prompted by the police. “What do you think?” I retorted. “You were inside living with us for two weeks. You know what kind of people we are.” “Did you kill the kids?” Louis insisted stupidly. I didn’t bother to answer, and the deputies soon removed him. I guess he was just trying to save his ass by acting as a snitch.

  Later, I shared a cell with Renos Avraam, who’d jumped off the burning roof to save himself, and with Derek Lovelock, who had come out of the same hole in the chapel wall I had. Derek said he was in the back with Jimmy Riddle when the tanks attacked, and they both fled into the cafeteria. Just as the fire was starting they’d tried to run out of the cafeteria but were driven back by gunfire. “You mean, the feds actually shot at people trying to escape?” I asked. Later, I looked into this possibility more closely and found that the facts were inconclusive, but Derek was certain he’d been under fire.

  Derek also told me that Clive Doyle saw Wayne Martin come into the chapel amid the smoke and fire. Somebody asked Wayne: “What do we do now?” Wayne answered: “Well, I guess we wait on God.” Clive escaped, but Wayne stayed and died of smoke inhalation.

  Clive himself had had a terrifying experience. When the tanks attacked he was in the chapel, taking a pause after hours spent transcribing David’s tape. Ferret rounds were crashing through the walls and windows. “They whizzed past my head like rockets,” he said. He saw one strike Jimmy Riddle’s gas mask and knock him flat.

  The entry was blocked by falling debris, and Clive cowered in the chapel while the gassing continued. When the fire started he followed me into the rubble behind the stage. “If we come out, will we be shot?” he’d asked me.

  It was no idle question. During the siege we had discovered that a nest of FBI snipers was hidden behind sandbags at the rear of the property. And there was a tank parked beside the boat shed, a frightening obstacle to any escape.

  Now the smoke was thickening, Clive recalled. It was pitch-black where we were, the temperature so intense he fell to the floor and rolled around, trying to hide from the heat. His hands were bare, and he felt his skin begin to bubble. “I saw other adults with less clothing crying in pain as the CS gas stung their skin,” he said. “Some of them were trying to wipe the gas residue off with damp rags, but that only made things worse.”

  Unable to stand the heat-torture any longer, Clive dived headlong through the same hole in the sheetrock where Jaime, Derek Lovelock, and I had escaped. The right side of his face and his left ankle were scorched, as were his hands. In shock and agony, thinking he was the only survivor, he ran toward the razor-wire fence the feds had laid around the building. Then he saw me walking toward the agents with my hands in the air.

  Agents shoved Clive to the ground beside Ruth Riddle, whose ankle was broken. A fed grabbed Ruth by the hair and screamed at her to tell him where the children were. Then Clive heard a voice say, “You better quit that, they’re taking pictures,” and the agent let go of Ruth’s hair. “Soon after,” Clive recalled, “I learned that my daughter Shari was dead, burned up in the building.”

  One of the saddest stories was the fate handed Misty Ferguson, Rita Riddle’s teenage daughter. During the fire she tried to get out the back, but the tanks had pushed the debris and the feds’ razor-wire barricade toward the building, so she couldn’t jump out the window. Misty ran upstairs, trying to get to the front of the building to find a way out. As the gas mask began to melt on her cheeks, she ran screaming toward a window. Just then, the floor collapsed and she was hurled down into a wall of flames. She held out her hands to stop her fall, and her fingers and thumbs
were burned right off before she escaped. I was told it would take years of surgery and therapy to repair her hands, if they ever could be repaired; but I imagined that the young woman’s psychological trauma would be irreparable.

  Some of our people’s agonies were even more horrific.

  Julie Martinez’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Audrey, and three other girls, raging in age from two to fourteen, were buried alive when the concrete roof of the storage room in which they were sheltering collapsed. Julie and her five children died hugging one another.

  A seven-year-old boy was burned to death, along with a one-year-old child whose body was too badly burned to determine its sex. Nine children died from gunshot wounds, including Abigail Martinez, plus a six-year-old and a two-year-old. Rosemary Morrison, Jennifer and Katherine Andrade, and seventeen others died from inhaling toxic fumes. Rebecca Saipaia and a young man were also burned. Wayne died alone in the chapel. In the tower above the storage room nine men and women died in a circle, facing outward like the spokes of a wheel.

  The autopsies conducted by Dr. Rodney Crow, chief medical examiner for Tarrant County, and his assistant, Dr. Nizam Peerwani, reported that, apart from those who had fatal gunshot wounds, most of the other people in Mount Carmel died of smoke and carbon monoxide inhalation. Some suffocated while buried alive or died of blunt trauma from collapsing structures. Dr. Crow said that thirty-nine of the residents in Mount Carmel expired from toxic inhalation and nine from suffocation, mostly kids. Twenty-one had gunshot wounds, some in the mouth, seemingly suicidal, some in the back of the head, mercy-killing style. Three who died from blunt force trauma were not beaten to death, as the media had previously reported, but rather had been crushed by falling masonry.