According to the coroner’s autopsies, those who died from bullet wounds included David, Steve Schneider, and David Jones. James Riddle, Stephen Henry, Neal Vaega, Lisa Farris, and Abigail Martinez received gunshot wounds to the forehead. Philip Henry and Novellette Hipsman had bullet wounds in their foreheads and chests. Mary Jean Borst was shot in the back. Four adults and one child died of gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Another unidentified woman had bullet wounds in the chest and back, and one infant died of a gunshot wound to the forehead. Dr. Crow commented that the condition in Mount Carmel during the fire was so intolerable that if he’d been in there himself he might well have shot his own child as an act of compassion, rather than let him suffer.
In the years since that terrible Monday in April, I’ve slowly put together a more complete picture of what happened inside and outside Mount Carmel. In pursuit of a balanced view, I’ve talked to many of the other survivors and listened to a variety of experts and commentators. I’ve watched the news footage of the ATF and FBI actions over and over, and I’ve read the voluminous testimony of federal agents and other law enforcement officers and officials, in congressional hearings and in various reports. I’ve researched a mountain of newspapers, magazines, and books, scanned the Internet, and examined legal documents and transcripts. Slowly and painfully, I’ve developed a sense of the full dimension of the catastrophe as it was experienced by people on both sides of the fence that so fatally divided our community from the world beyond.
Despite my natural outrage and sadness over the loss of so many of my friends, I’ve tried to weigh the facts honestly, with a fair mind, not to generate a polemic but as a need to understand how something so horrible could happen in the heart of the United States. Given the ambiguities and confusions that will forever haunt the story of Mount Carmel, I can only offer my particular version of the truth. But I believe it to be true—as truthful as I can make it.
Take, for instance, the controversy concerning the gunfire that may or may not have occurred on April 19. Now, years after the event, questions linger unresolved: Did the feds fire on us, or did we fire on them? Was there any exchange of gunfire at all? (This is a separate issue from the mercy killings, described in the coroner’s report, that may have taken place during the gassing and the fire.)
I heard no shots that fatal day, but during the morning attack one of the radios that still functioned relayed an FBI report that agents had recorded eighty to a hundred rounds of hostile gunfire. The broadcast went on to state that the FBI had refrained from returning fire for fear of endangering the women and children. At the time, my reaction was disbelief mixed with dread. Later, I was able to take a more objective view of the evidence.
The crucial documentation concerning the shooting issue comes from an infrared videotape taken by a surveillance aircraft flying two miles above Mount Carmel during the final attack on April 19. This advanced technology is known as forward-looking infrared (FLIR—pronounced “fleer”). FLIR technology was used to detect tanks and enemy installations during the Gulf War and is now included in the equipment of many U.S. airplanes.
On March 21 London’s Sunday Times reported that two weeks earlier the FBI had requested the loan of a special British surveillance plane. Such aircraft “flying overhead can pick up conversations between cult members and pinpoint their position using infra-red devices that lock onto heat sources,” the newspaper reported. However, the heat-source images on the FLIR tapes record incidents that require interpretation by highly skilled experts, and the controversy over just what these images might mean continues to this day.
Some reputable experts have claimed that the vivid flashes of light revealed on the tapes are evidence of gunfire; others, equally reputable, say that they are merely reflections of sunlight on bright objects. What charges this controversy is the fact that the flashes on the April 19 tapes are clearly shown coming from the areas controlled by the agents. So even if these flashes are, indeed, gunfire, they are proof that the feds were shooting at us, not the other way around.
Physicist Edward Allard, former supervisor of the Department of Defense’s night-vision laboratory at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, worked for the Defense Department as a thermal-image consultant for more than thirty years. At the 1995 congressional hearings, and in subsequent interviews and affidavits, Allard testified that the images shown on the FLIR tapes were most definitely made by gunfire. “Nothing in nature would duplicate this kind of thermal signature,” he said.
Allard concluded that the flashes on the tapes clearly showed the feds firing automatic weapons into the rear of our building, into the gymnasium and the cafeteria, at 11:24 A.M., and around ten minutes later—a total of forty-four separate incidents. He commented that the number and frequency of the flashes suggested the intensity of the FBI’s fury at the people clustered in the cafeteria area, where many gunshot victims were found.
Allard’s testimony to Congress was repeated in a motion in federal court, filed by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark in October 1996 on behalf of the families of those killed in the fire. Clark’s motion argues that Allard’s analysis “leaves no doubt the U.S. repeatedly fired gunshots into the church [Mount Carmel] and its occupants.” The lawsuit accuses the government of acting recklessly, negligently, and perhaps criminally at Waco. The Justice Department says this is “outrageous and absurd” but has yet to produce expert rebuttal.
Allard’s testimony was backed up by Infraspection Institute, a specialist company that was asked by the producers of CBS’s 60 Minutes to interpret the FLIR tapes for a report on Waco they were preparing in 1996.
Infraspection’s analysis not only verified Allard’s opinions but also claimed that the tapes revealed that several people had been deliberately run over by armored vehicles. This finding tied in with the fact that autopsies had found, in the corner of the Mount Carmel gym destroyed by a tank, five bodies with extensive mutilation, including Stephen Henry, whose leg was sheared at the hip, and Jimmy Riddle, who had the right side of his chest ripped from his body so violently that the tank that ran over him lost its tread.
However, the FBI, when approached by CBS producers, denied both Allard’s and Infraspection’s claims. The network never broadcast the story, claiming the FLIR evidence was deemed too “sensitive.”
In an article that ran in April 1997, the Washington Post investigated the issue of the interpretation of the FLIR tapes and convinced the FBI to show portions of the tapes to its reporters. “John M. Hogan, Attorney General Janet Reno’s chief of staff, says these bright blips are benign glints of noonday sun,” the Post reported. It added that the “FBI says an examination of the entire FLIR tape—which runs several hours—would… discredit the gunfire theory. Yet the government has delayed releasing the entire tape to attorneys who filed a Freedom of Information Act suit in Arizona. The bureau also hasn’t provided a full copy to the Washington Post, which first requested one in December 1996.”
To delve deeper, the Post sent copies of the tape extracts to a dozen experts, some with infrared and weapons experience; others were “local defense contractors who specialize in interpreting FLIR.” Four of the analysts “were convinced they saw bursts on the tape indicative of gunfire going into the compound.” Others declared the evidence inconclusive. At Fort Belvoir, Allard’s old base, the senior scientist said: “It looks like reflections to us.” The Post concluded its investigation with the comment that interpreting FLIR is as much art as science.
To date, the FBI has produced no hard evidence whatsoever that we did any shooting, except for such anecdotal accounts as FBI chief negotiator Byron Sage’s claim to have seen bullets ricocheting like “sparklers” from the flanks of a tank as it smashed into our front wall early that fateful Monday morning. During the 1995 congressional hearings, U.S. Representative Howard Coble revealed that his committee had asked the military for records of gunfire damage to the tanks but had received none.
No federal agents were killed or wounded o
n April 19, and neither is there any unambiguous evidence that the feds shot people down in cold blood. None of the Mount Carmel survivors I’ve talked to are absolutely sure there was any shooting at all that day. But there are several troubling details that stick in the mind, such as the FBI’s order of eighty body bags. Either the FBI were victims of their own propaganda that we would commit mass suicide, or else the agency was fully aware that its dangerous tactics, including the use of firearms, might well have tragic consequences.
As anecdotal evidence, there was a phone call Clive Doyle’s mother, Edna, said she received from a neighbor, who owned a house adjoining the rear of our property, the side hidden from the media’s cameras. Edna lived in a trailer two miles away from Mount Carmel with Mary Belle Jones, Perry Jones’s wife. The call came in around noon on April 19, at the height of the blaze. Mary Belle, who answered the phone, told Edna that the neighbor said he’d seen “twenty-five to thirty” people who ran out of the back of the building being shot down by federal agents. “He wouldn’t give his name because he didn’t want to be involved,” Edna said. There were also rumors that another neighbor had actually videotaped this shooting; but the tape, if it ever existed, has vanished.
Apart from the fire and the gunfire questions, other issues remain for which there are, as yet, no clear answers.
These include the controversy over the amount and variety of the weaponry we supposedly “stockpiled” in Mount Carmel, and whether our armory included .50-caliber machine guns, as the government claimed. These questions have no clear answers for many reasons, not least of which is the way the feds treated the official “crime scene” that Mount Carmel became after April 19.
During the 1994 San Antonio trial of eleven members of our community for attempted murder and other charges, Texas Ranger Captain David Byrnes complained that his crime scene processing team was prevented from entering the site while the ATF was “obviously altering outside evidence.” He said he was concerned that the agents had “salted” the scene with bogus evidence.
Also, Texas Ranger Fred Cummings testified that half of Mount Carmel’s metal double front door was missing—the right half, which revealed the spray pattern of entry holes, confirming that the ATF had fired a burst of automatic fire at David as he tried to talk to them when the agents first attacked us on February 28. Cummings added that he’d seen “trash” being loaded into a dumpster by FBI agents before the scene was processed for evidence. The FBI also interfered with the Tarrant County Coroner’s office investigation. They confiscated videotapes made by the county’s photographer—then “lost” them. (The FBI also lost other relevant items, notably a steel safe containing $50,000 in cash and some gold and platinum, found in the ashes by the Texas Rangers and officially signed over to the agency.)
At San Antonio, the prosecution introduced into evidence 300 guns said to have been found “in and around” Mount Carmel, plus a bunch of dummy grenades, parts of exploded grenades, and remnants of 500,000 rounds of ammo. Prosecutors showed the court illegal homemade rifle-silencers and forty-eight illegally converted semiautomatic rifles. However, there were none of the heavy .50-caliber machine guns the feds claimed we had used against the ATF in February and threatened them with again on April 19. To add to the mystery, Byrnes, posing in the Texas Ranger evidence vault on a TV show, displayed two scorched .50-caliber guns he claimed were part of the “Davidian armory.” This inventory of weapons is altogether suspect because the government has never allowed any independent examination of the guns the FBI claims to have found in the ashes of Mount Carmel.
So where does this leave our honest endeavor to evaluate the validity of the reasons the government has offered to justify its assault on Mount Carmel?
Clearly, the child-abuse excuse was nonsense, a deliberate lie designed to con Reno into allowing the Justice Department brass in Washington and the gung-ho tactical commanders on the ground to use highly dangerous tear gas on women and children. Though she was new to the wiles of Washington, Reno should have been a great deal more skeptical, of both the people pressuring her and the experts the feds produced. And she should certainly have taken the trouble to scrutinize the FBI assault plan a lot more carefully than she did. (In a footnote to the Justice Department report, Reno is quoted as acknowledging that, as far as the FBI’s assault plan was concerned, she had “read only a chronology, gave the rest of the material a cursory review, and satisfied herself the documentation was there.”)
Similarly, the mass-suicide line was a crock. If any of the people who died shot themselves or their children, it was a desperate response to finding themselves trapped in the gas-filled, crumbling, burning building. As Dr. Crow, the Tarrant County coroner, concluded, these would surely have been acts of compassion, not religious mania.
Although neither we nor the feds deliberately set Mount Carmel ablaze, the FBI must have been aware that the toxic brew they injected into our building in such enormous quantities would create a highly flammable condition that windy day. They obviously knew, too, that since they’d cut off our power, we were down to using kerosene lamps and propane heaters that would surely be knocked over when the tanks demolished parts of our building.
So what valid reasons, apart from frustration and impatience, did the authorities, at the highest level, truly have for wiping us out? Hardly any, it seems to me—and that is horrible.
17
AFTERLIFE
One week after the destruction of Mount Carmel I came out of jail into my mother’s waiting arms. She hugged me so hard I thought my skinny ribs would crack. “Davey, Davey, Davey,” she murmured over and over, as if saying my name confirmed my existence after I’d come so close to dying.
I emerged from the McLellan County lockup with bare feet. Balenda had sent me shoes to replace the ones I’d worn when I stumbled out of the burning building, but the deputies refused to give them to me. Since the ATF kept my clothes for evidence, I needed a new wardrobe to replace my orange jail suit.
After a shopping trip, my mother took me to the Brittany Hotel, where she had been staying and working. The hotel owner, Mark Domangue, had generously given rooms to all the family members who had relatives in Mount Carmel, and some of them, like Balenda and Rita Riddle, worked there as payback.
Sadly, Mark’s compassion had ruined his business. Guests shunned his hotel because it had become known as a Davidian hangout.
As I sprawled on the bed, relaxing for the first time in months, I noticed that my mother was nervously looking out the window.
“Expecting someone?” I asked.
“Those feds!” she burst out. Her face was red and agitated, giving me a glimpse of the strain she must have been under for the eight long weeks of the siege and my detention.
I laughed at her fears of the feds; after what I’d just been through, what more harm could they do me? When I embraced her I found she was trembling, and for a long moment I comforted her, patting her back as if she were the child and I the parent. In a sense, it was so. My experiences, both physical and spiritual, had aged me, and I was no longer the roly-poly boy she knew and loved, no longer the delayed adolescent I’d been when David found me on Sunset Boulevard.
That night my attorney, Gary Richardson, treated us to dinner at the local Hilton. I feasted on a delicious filet mignon, the best steak I’d ever had. I’d lived on those miserable MREs for weeks, had hardly eaten in prison, and suddenly my ravenous old hunger returned full force. That hunger was my enemy, and I tried to fight it. I was lean, emaciated like a strung-out rocker, and I loved the way I looked. Never in my life had I been so thin, and I wanted to stay that way, as a signal to a hostile world that I was in fighting trim and ready for combat. But that steak was fatal. The wall was breached, and appetite won out. For the following weeks I was hungry all the time and could never feel full. It was my first retreat back into my old mode.
Meanwhile, I had a role to play as witness. David had primed me for the part, and I stepped forward to its first summ
ons.
Gary Richardson, who was my agent as well as my attorney (that’s how he hoped his fees would be paid), urged me to give my first interview to the Fox-TV news show A Current Affair, which had offered to pay me $25,000. At the same time, Ted Koppel wanted me on Nightline, which had a much larger audience but was unpaid. Since Nightline had more clout, I had decided to go to New York to see Koppel when Mary Garofalo, the anchor of A Current Affair, approached me. She told me she’d been in Waco all the time, had put all her energy into covering the story, and felt she knew more about our ordeal than Koppel, who’d never been near Mount Carmel. To convince me of her commitment, and her intention to present a balanced view of events, Mary showed me a clip of an interview she’d done with Louis Alaniz on April 19, as part of her program. In that footage Louis talked about David showing him around Mount Carmel two days before the attack, and how happy and healthy the kids were.
Louis also revealed that the FBI had asked him where the children usually hung out, and Louis told them he’d seen many of the kids in the upstairs room over the front door. By informing the feds about this he hoped they would avoid areas where kids concentrated. However, first thing that Monday morning, one of the CEVs deliberately smashed into that very location.
Louis said the feds, duped by their own fantasy that we had antitank weapons, asked him if we had any guns that could take out tanks. “I told them no,” Louis asserted. Speaking to the camera a few hours after the conflagration he’d seen on TV, the poor guy was in tears for most of the interview.
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