Waco

by David Thibodeau

  David was the ghost hovering over these events, a presence no one could ignore. Without him, none of us—defendants, attorneys, judges, jurors, officials, spectators, media—would have entered that San Antonio courtroom. The next day, Renos and Livingston gave a press conference from prison in which they declared that “David will return in a cloud of glory”; and David’s mother, Bonnie, said he’d appeared to her in a series of vivid dreams.

  I felt as if he had never left.

  Given Sarah Bain’s comments, we hoped the sentences of those still in federal custody would be light and that, with good behavior, they’d soon be set free. Then we could concentrate on a future without David’s presence and what that would mean to us all.

  But on June 17 Judge Smith handed out sentences that flew in the face of the jury’s opinion that none of the eight people in custody should face severe penalties. Smith stated that because the defendants had been found guilty of having weapons during the commission of a crime they were in effect guilty of the original charge of conspiracy to commit murder. The supposed conspiracy to kill federal agents was, in Smith’s view, “a part of the beliefs of the Branch Davidians, expressed and taught by their leader.”

  Charging on, Smith declared that we had definitely fired the first shots on February 28 and set Mount Carmel ablaze on April 19. “Finally, by a combination of suicide and murder inflicted by Davidian upon Davidian, all but a handful of the Davidians were killed.” It was as if the judge found guilt where the jury had found innocence.

  With swift dispatch, Smith handed out stiff sentences. Renos Avraam, Brad Branch, Jaime Castillo, Kevin Whitecliff, and Livingston Fagan were each sentenced to forty years. As a consolation prize for incriminating himself before the grand jury, Graeme Craddock’s sentence was reduced to twenty years. Paul Fatta received fifteen years and Ruth Riddle received five, even though it was clear she hadn’t shot at anyone. For her services to the prosecution, Kathy Schroeder received a three-year sentence and has since been released. All eight were heavily fined to compensate the ATF and FBI for their losses in attacking us.

  A shocked Livingston declared: “There is no doubt in my mind that the actions that we were forced to take were justified.” Paul Fatta told a reporter: “I’m suffering [but] whether I’m out there in the so-called free world, it really doesn’t matter. I’m beyond that. The issue to us is relative to what God is doing.… Man has already demonstrated his willing incompetence.” Jaime told the court: “I just hope that out of this whole situation, I hope it’s pricked the conscience of people to realize and to understand.”

  I wasn’t in San Antonio for the sentencing, but I was truly shattered when I learned of its harshness. The terms seemed so vindictive, as if the authorities, not content to have destroyed our community, wanted to grind us down, wipe us out of the collective memory. The thought of quiet, friendly Jaime shut away for forty years made my blood boil.

  I wasn’t the only one who was upset by Judge Smith’s actions.

  A few weeks after the sentencing, Sarah Bain wrote a sharp letter to Judge Smith, challenging his criticisms of the jury’s verdicts. To a reporter, Bain was even more forthright: “The federal government was absolutely out of control there,” she said. “We spoke in the jury room about the fact that the wrong people were on trial, that it should have been the ones that planned the raid and orchestrated it and insisted on carrying out this plan who should have been on trial.”

  Judge Smith, of course, ignored Bain’s plea. A series of appeals was launched, forcing a resentencing hearing in Smith’s Waco courtroom on August 4, 1997. There the shackled prisoners once more confronted their nemesis. The defense attorneys argued that in each case no evidence had been introduced to prove that any of the defendants had actually been involved in the crimes for which they’d been convicted. They also reminded Judge Smith that the jury had found no evidence of the conspiracy upon which the judge had based his harsh sentences. Smith listened impatiently, then reconfirmed the sentences he’d handed out three years earlier.

  “This nation is supposed to run under laws, not personal feelings,” Renos protested. “When you ignore the law you sow the seeds of terrorism.”

  The seven people who were sentenced were shipped off to different prisons. After several moves, Jaime and Graeme ended up in the Federal Correctional Institution in Oakdale, Louisiana; Kevin and Brad were housed in the federal facility in Beaumont, Texas; Renos in El Reno, Oklahoma; Paul Fatta in Anthony, New Mexico; Ruth Riddle in Danbury, Connecticut (she has since been released, having served out her term). Livingston landed in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he has suffered brutal mistreatment by the guards.

  “My salvation remains precarious at best,” Livingston wrote in late 1996. In letters given to released fellow inmates, he described being beaten and thrown into a cold open cell, or “cage,” in his underwear, without blankets or a mattress, suffering two epileptic seizures as a consequence. “After continuously slamming my head against a concrete, then metal structure, followed by my body against a concrete floor… the 300 lb. officer then verbalized his intent to kill me for not cowering to his will.” But Livingston’s spirits have remained high. “Fear is a cruel master,” he wrote early in 1998. “It is not, however, unconquerable.”

  I didn’t know and was at a loss what to do with my feelings of rage at the treatment of my friends, but I didn’t want to become the kind of person whose life is powered by fury.

  I lingered in San Antonio for a day or two after the original jury verdict, reluctant to return to Bangor. In my hometown I’d been drifting in a daze. My mother, sensing my state of mind, worried over me with anxious phone calls, and I knew my vague answers weren’t reassuring.

  Then I had one of those chance encounters that seem casual enough yet turn out pivotal. I met Ron Cole, a yuppie kid from Colorado, best described as a Davidian wannabe. Moved by the Mount Carmel catastrophe, he had come to Waco to help the surviving community members trace where our remaining property was before the feds seized it. He wore a “David Koresh/God Rocks” T-shirt and eventually took possession of David’s Chevy Camaro.

  I wasn’t in Waco when Ron arrived, so I hadn’t met him till San Antonio. I heard from Clive Doyle that he’d joined the rump group left in Waco and had attended several of the Scripture study sessions. Later, Ron and Clive fell out badly when Ron claimed he’d been “accepted worldwide as a Davidian leader,” but at that time they were still friends.

  Ron had militia connections, and in 1997 he was arrested and imprisoned in Colorado for possession of illegal weapons, but that was still way down the line when we first met.

  Ron said he was going to Florida to give a talk about Mount Carmel, and he suggested I come along for the ride. “We’ll do the Easy Rider back-roads thing,” he said. To me, it seemed a good, wild idea right then, a break from all the heaviness. Ron suggested I address some of the so-called patriot groups he knew in Florida and Louisiana, telling them about Mount Carmel. “Why shut up? Why let them get away with it?” Ron asked, and I had to agree. Silence is a form of consent, and I just couldn’t let the evil popular picture of David and our community stand without trying to combat it.

  Ron’s car had a sound system, and before we set out we visited a music store to buy some CDs to power our ride. Ron favored the songs of a new heavy metal band called Rage Against the Machine, and in my dark mood I liked the sound of the name. As we sped across Texas toward Florida we belted out the lyrics, especially the refrain, Why stand on a silent platform. In the verbal violence of the heavy-metal rap I began to find my voice.

  The first talk I gave in Florida was at a local school in a small town near the Everglades, home to one of Ron’s friends. The spring night was hot and airless and I was sweating as I confronted the rows of faces in the school gym. As Ron introduced me, I silently prayed to God to give me the words to be a true witness, but His attention seemed elsewhere. My throat was dry and my brain felt like a prickly cactus.

  Then,
suddenly, a gust of wind sprang up, stirring the palm leaves outside, rustling through the auditorium like a cool whisper. I got goosebumps. Rising to my feet at Ron’s gesture, I launched into an impassioned description of Mount Carmel’s catastrophe, concentrating on the way the feds had trashed our constitutional rights. The audience ate it up, clapping and cheering for several minutes while I sat there, eyes shining, inspired by my own energies.

  Is rage truly my kind of inspiration? I wondered afterward, as Ron and I and a few others went to a bar for some beers. The notion was invigorating but scary. Such fury wasn’t true to my nature, but it was a way to power my ascent of the mountain. The cost, I dimly began to realize, would be a split between the public and the private man, but at the time that seemed a price worth paying.

  What was tricky, though, was the politics of the audiences who most wanted to hear me. They came from the patriot community, a broad, vague label that describes citizens who feel government is all too often guilty of gross abuses of power. Patriots, I began to discover, ranged from average working-class folks—electricians, mail carriers, gas-station attendants, factory workers—to rampant militia members, and all of them were more than ready to view Mount Carmel’s fate as a prime example of the feds exceeding their authority.

  Early on I encountered the more extreme wing of this loosely organized element of American society. Ron and I were invited to a camp in the Everglades, a place secured by checkpoints manned by armed guards with walkie-talkies. Inside the camp we found several hundred men and women dressed in military fatigues, living in tents while training in survivalist techniques. Their watchword was “preparedness,” and I was later invited to several of the survivalists’ Preparedness Expos held around the United States.

  Before I was called upon to speak, a man named Mark from the Michigan Militia talked about the constitutional right to bear arms. To a chorus of lusty cheers, he damned all “pinko-liberal” advocates of gun control. He was followed by a member of the Florida Militia who described something called “spike training,” which I gathered involved a week in the Nevada desert learning how to survive by eating cactus and lizards. These guys mean business, I said to myself, and the thought was both chilling and exhilarating.

  I was the featured speaker, and I just went for it hammer and tongs. Though I ran on for three solid hours, not a soul in the big marquee moved a muscle. Several hundred eyes were riveted on me, and the electric rush was heady. What juice there is in words! I exulted when I finally sat down. It was the kind of power that David possessed, and I saw then how it could electrify the unwary. But on the ride out of camp I began to wonder where I was going with all this amazingly articulate anger.

  I knew that those militiamen were right-wing radicals—far too radical for my taste—but they seemed to be the only Americans willing to hear what I had to say. The best of the patriots, I felt, were struggling to rethink their identity as Americans, and like me, they were truly scared by what had happened at Mount Carmel. But Mount Carmel was about Scripture, not politics, and I knew it was a perversion for it to became symbolic for the wrong reasons, for the wrong cause.

  What is true patriotism? I asked myself, over and over. Rather than the desperate response of taking up arms against ourselves, it had to be a belief in the inherent decency of America.

  In any case, violence was not the answer, and I hoped the main memory of the Mount Carmel community would never become what the feds tried so deviously to imprint on the public mind: that we were a bunch of Bible-spouting wackos armed to the teeth. Most people seemed to have swallowed that story hook, line, and sinker, and I wanted to tell America what happened to us, what we really were about.

  After the Everglades experience I spoke frequently to audiences ranging from a dozen to hundreds. Sometimes a family would ask me to come talk in a private home; other times I addressed a group of lawyers concerned with constitutional and civil rights issues. Over and over, people came up to me after I spoke at meetings and said they felt they had been lied to by the government and the media. There seemed to be a considerable and widespread distrust of these forces that shape our society—a healthy distrust, I felt, and I found I could make people weep with my sad tale—or rouse them to anger. Then, I had to suggest they use their anger in positive, not negative, ways.

  Altogether, public speaking brought me out of my numb rage and gave me a voice. At times, though, I feared I might be thrown in jail for some of the things I said. All the while, my passion was focused on the memory of all the children who’d died for no good reason.

  There was one wonderfully funny moment in my odyssey through the South—in Miami, where I was invited to participate in a TV talk show. A production assistant with a clipboard led me into the studio while an on-camera interview was in progress. To my amazement the man sitting up there with the talk show host was none other than President Clinton!

  I was ten feet away from Clinton, who seemed totally unprotected. Looking around, I saw no Secret Service personnel, no guys with brush cuts, lapel mics, and holstered Glocks bulging their jackets. I imagined grabbing Clinton by the lapels, shaking some sense into him, asking him on camera why he’d allowed his attorney general to murder our children. Hell, it was the chance of a lifetime!

  “The Clinton look-alike,” the assistant said tersely.

  “Pity,” I muttered, and she laughed.

  As April approached I planned to return to Waco for a memorial that Clive Doyle and others had organized to mark the first anniversary of Mount Carmel’s destruction. The event was named “A Day of Information” to bring people together and remind the public how and by whom our community had been obliterated. When I phoned him, Clive told me he expected several hundred people to attend the ceremony on the site of Mount Carmel’s ruin.

  Clive also told me that a meeting had been arranged on the day before the event with the core group of survivors and a panel of attorneys led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Clark and several other attorneys had filed wrongful-death suits totaling millions of dollars against the U.S. government on behalf of the families of people who’d been killed in Mount Carmel, as well as other suits for the survivors collectively.

  For the Clark meeting we gathered in a conference room at the Brittany Hotel, where I was staying. There were four other lawyers apart from the former attorney general, but he was the most impressive figure. Tall and serious, he had an air of authority that reinforced his reputation as a former close associate of Robert Kennedy and a dedicated advocate of civil rights cases.

  What took place at Mount Carmel, Clark told us, “may be able to tell us more about ourselves as Americans than anything that’s happened.” There was, he stated bluntly, “absolutely no justification for the fatal acts.” His concern in all this, he emphasized, was to defend the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. “The rights they took away from you they took away from everyone in this country,” he declared. Since the federal authorities, abetted by the media, had labeled us a “cult,” their actions toward us could only be characterized as religious persecution.

  Then Clark added a remark that surprised me. Commenting on the February San Antonio trial (before Judge Smith handed out his harsh sentences) Clark labeled the proceedings “political.” I was about to question him on this, when he explained that the government, in his view, could not have afforded to lose that trial in the forum of public opinion. “To my mind, that’s what makes this tragedy a political act.”

  After talking to groups of people in Florida and Louisiana, I knew what he meant. Although mainstream America had apparently made up its essentially indifferent mind about us, the patriot community had adopted Waco as a club to wield against the government. The liberal left, which during the sixties and seventies had itself beaten up on Washington and all it stood for, now seemed to be rallying to the government’s defense. I wondered if an old lefty like my mom would have condemned us outright if she hadn’t had an inside track on what had really h
appened at Mount Carmel. She hated guns with a passion, and for one reason or another, the issue of gun control had moved center stage in the controversy over our destruction. If she hadn’t known us, the arguments about common Texas practice and the right to defend oneself against excessive force would’ve washed right over her head.

  “Can we get justice, Mr. Clark?” I asked.

  “I believe in the possibility of justice,” he answered firmly, and his tone encouraged me. Despite my bitter experiences, I didn’t want to let go of the notion that America would finally hear us out. Yet sitting in that brightly lit, windowless room in Waco, it seemed to me that the catastrophe at Mount Carmel had ripped an ugly hole in the very fabric of American society.

  The attorneys warned us that it could take years before the civil actions came to trial. Clark said he’d been involved in lawsuits arising from the 1970 killing of four Kent State students by the National Guard, and they still were unresolved. But a civil action would allow us to present evidence that Judge Smith had excluded, like the 911 calls Wayne Martin had made to Lieutenant Lynch, as well as a suppressed ATF video that was rumored to prove that the helicopters had fired on us first. The “discovery process” in civil actions, whereby documents can be demanded and must be produced by the parties, would also allow us to dig deeper than the officials who authored the self-justifying reports recently released by the Treasury and Justice Departments.

  In concluding his presentation, Clark urged us to consider if we wanted our group to continue as a church. An organized church would help with the lawsuits by presenting a unified community, he said. “I will always consider the community my family,” I replied. “We have to go on together.”