The Cokeville Miracle

by Hartt

  After the sing-along, Jack Mitchell watched as the reinvigorated kids began to wander dangerously close to David and the bomb cart. David even gestured to clear the kids away. From the nearest desk, Jack took some masking tape. Quickly, he taped off what he told the children was a “magic square.” The forbidden area left a wide berth around David and his cart. “Don’t go across this line!” Jack told the children. “If you do, you’re out of the game!” He was relieved to see the gap widen between David and the kids.

  Some of the children held an almost congenial conversation with Doris. Drew Cornia wanted to know how long they would be there. When Doris told him ten days or more, he paused. “If you’re going to hold us here ten days, I hope you brought us some toothbrushes.”

  “I hadn’t considered that,” Doris said with the trace of a smile.

  3:05 p.m.—Suddenly, David must have felt too warm. He decided to remove his jacket and sweater, even though it required lifting the same wrist with the shoelace trigger. Everyone in the room held still, mesmerized as they watched David pull his sleeve down to the shoelace-trigger. At one point, he seemed stuck. Doris assisted him, and he finally got the garment peeled down to the wrist, where he let it stay. “I could not hear anyone breathing,” Kam Wixom said. “It was as if we had turned to statues. We didn’t dare do anything until he quit moving his wrist around.”

  At times, David seemed to show signs of confusion. At other moments, he still seemed smug. “People pay attention when you’re holding elementary school children,” he gloated to Excell.

  Kliss Sparks also noticed David’s erratic behavior. She asked for permission to visit the library again to get more books for the children. It was readily given. “But if you don’t come back, one of these kids is going to die,” David told her suddenly and sharply. His voice was much more menacing than before.

  3:10 p.m.—The children were running out of coloring book pages. Jean asked permission to leave “just to make copies on the machine in the faculty room.” David granted permission. But when Jean got there, she realized the machine had been off for two hours and would now take at least four minutes just to warm up. She knelt down and prayed fervently while waiting for the minutes to pass. “We’ve tried everything! Please help the children do what we cannot do for them.” Getting up to make her copies, she felt better for admitting how tense she had become through the endless afternoon.

  On returning to Room 4, Jean felt David’s eyes on her and knew he had noted the delay. She passed out the papers and tried to get the youngsters involved as quickly and quietly as she could.

  During her absence, Jack and student teacher Kris Kasper had been given time to bring a television set from the media center to Room 4. A crowd of children, particularly the little ones, clamored eagerly for cartoons. Transformers, a big favorite, came on, and the children watched, engrossed, as the cartoon creatures changed from one form to another, endlessly making war with each other. Travis Walker watched their fascination with the big bangs and shoot-outs on the screen. “Hollywood explosions don’t hurt anyone,” he said.

  3:20 p.m.—For some reason, Travis felt compelled to leave his friends and go across the room to his sisters. After talking with them briefly, he rejoined his pals. Some of the children were beginning to wander aimlessly about again. David saw them but did not threaten them as before.

  3:30 p.m.—Jean Mitchell grew nervous. Had someone warned the bus drivers not to come by? What would the kids do if they heard the buses? Had Excell gotten word to the drivers? She wanted to call to him and ask but didn’t dare.

  3:35 p.m.—Several teachers sensed the atmosphere begin to change. “Something was about to happen,” Jean Mitchell recalled later. “You could feel the unbearable tension mounting.”

  Eva Clark was aware of the same thing. She looked at the man with the guns and the bomb. His confidence was ebbing! Something strange was occurring—she could feel it, but she couldn’t pin down what it was.

  3:45 p.m.—Unexpectedly, David called Doris over. He wanted to go to the bathroom. Everyone watched quietly while he changed the shoelace-trigger from his wrist to hers. No one had heard him say anything to Doris about the bomb, and he didn’t say anything now. Leaving her in his place, David walked past Jean Mitchell toward the bathroom.

  Jean knew the room had child-sized fixtures. “You’ll just die when you see the inside,” she said.

  David didn’t find the remark amusing. He stepped inside and shut the door.

  Once David was out of sight, the children relaxed. But with the removal of the tension he generated, they immediately became more restless and noisy as well. “Children!” said Jean Mitchell, “We need quiet time.” In the mounting hubbub, she was beginning to feel ill. David had not reappeared and Jean did not want him suddenly walking out into even a semblance of disorder and confusion. Raising her hand to her head, she admitted to Doris, “I’ve got a headache.”

  “So do I,” said Doris, and she made the same gesture with her hand. It was the hand the trigger was tied to.

  In an instant, a huge ball of orange flame cracked into being with a deafening roar from wall to wall. Within a moment, everyone was blinded by choking black smoke. Jean Mitchell felt herself lifted up by the blast wave and thrown toward the door.

  The deadman’s bomb had blown.

  Chapter Four

  More than a Miracle

  “Labeling it a miracle would be the understatement of the century.”

  —Richard Haskell, bomb expert

  We’re all dead!” Tina Cook cried out as the room exploded around her. Bursting lights snapped out in a wave of searing heat and unbearable pressure.

  Eva Clark, tossed from her chair, saw Doris Young, dreadfully illuminated against the pitch-black smoke, engulfed by the fireball she had just unleashed. In the hellish pandemonium, with the clang of fire alarms suddenly beating on her eardrums, Eva felt like she was inside a sonic boom. She had never known fear like this.

  Children screamed in pain and panic. Everyone who could run or walk did so, while those who couldn’t crawled or blindly groped, searching for air and the closest way out.

  “Run!” boomed Jack Mitchell’s voice in the half-dark of smoke and burning debris. “Get out of here! Run!” Jack knew David Young might still be unharmed, waiting to shoot down the children and adults who had endured the tension better than he.

  Janel Dayton struggled to get her bearings. She saw the fire, the smoke, and the chaos surrounding her, yet everything was utterly still. She realized she couldn’t hear anything at all. In the silence, she remembered she had been guarding the south barricade, as David Young had ordered. Immediately, she began to dismantle the pile of furniture to clear a path for the children.

  The smoke rolled away momentarily, and she looked back into the room. Jean Mitchell was lying on the floor not far away, alive but finding it difficult to move. Janel ran to her aid. She tried to help Jean stand, but neither had enough strength. Suddenly, smoke more thick and acrid than before rolled over them. Janel couldn’t breathe. Choking and forced to abandon Jean, she plunged through the south door into the hallway, then up to the other door, hoping to find her first graders.

  The deafening explosion seemed to leave Carol Petersen numb. She had been sitting on the floor with kids curled across her lap. When they were swept away by the force of the explosion, she tried to stand, but her muscles wouldn’t respond. Terrified, she felt ridiculous as well. Was she going to die here because her legs had fallen asleep?

  In the southeast corner, a great shower of flame descended on a large group of kindergartners and first graders who had been intently watching TV. Children screamed in pain and fright as their clothes and hair caught fire. Some tried to escape from the deadly location; others attempted to beat out the flames with their bare hands.

  Few knew it at the time, but the design of this deadman’s bomb sent most of its explosion thrusting up to the ceiling once the device was set off. From there, the force powere
d out to the walls and plummeted straight down their sides. Anyone sitting or standing near those walls took the explosion’s hottest and heaviest impact.

  In contrast, children standing near the border that marked the “magic square” took the first brunt of the detonation. It seemed to Christy Clark that her skin itself was on fire.

  Kam Wixom and Travis Walker were luckier. They were near the doorway as the bomb went off and suddenly found themselves thrust into the hallway to safety. Tina Morfeld, farther inside the room, caught a billow of superheated air. Unable to see where to run, she had to take a breath. Instantly, the biting heat scorched her throat and lungs.

  Billie Jo Hutchinson was also near the magic square, or “line of death,” as the older children secretly dubbed it. Before she could move, she was hit by a wall of fire. Shocked and numbed by the blast, at first she felt no pain. All around her, teachers were probing for bodies, hoping to feel life in the small arms and legs they grasped or hear the muffled call of a child, injured but alive, still strong enough to cry for help.

  Rocky Moore was near the windows. Instantly, he grabbed the first kids he saw and began stuffing them through the ten-inch-wide opening of the small ventilation window. He was amazed at how fast they went through. But the children, still dazed—some in shock—were slow to run. “I looked out and saw them stacking up like a cord of firewood,” Rocky said. Still not sure whether David Young was nearby, he screamed at the kids, “Run! Run! Get away from the building!” They ran as hard as they could, then suddenly stopped at the edge of the lawn, just as in school fire drill, where they’d been taught to wait for their teachers. Obedient little beggars! Rocky yelled at them again, “Get off the school ground, get out of sight!”

  He turned back to look for more kids and was horrified to see blackened faces on some, and others with clothes still glowing. Several ran toward him with their hair in flames. He and the other teachers had no towels or blankets—they could only smother the flames with sleeves and bare hands. He kept the little bodies moving through the window frame—there was no time to check for minor or even serious injuries. First priority was to get them out alive.

  By this point, Rocky had only seen children who he knew had been on his side of the room. It was hard to feel any confidence that those closest to the fireball and the acrid smoke had survived. As it was, the smoke would overcome everyone if they didn’t all get out soon.

  In some ways, the children on the opposite side of the room had an advantage because the doors allowed immediate escape, if only they could find them.

  Out in the hallway, Jack Mitchell was looking for his wife. “Have you seen Jean?” he called to a figure running down the hall. He did not know she had been blasted toward the door, that Janel Dayton had tried and failed to help her, or that she had finally been able to half-crawl to safety by herself. The smoke-obscured figure passed him by without a response.

  Running took on an almost mystical importance—if you could run, you could live. Kindergartner Johnny King ran into the schoolyard crying, “I don’t wanna die!” He finally collapsed at the feet of Judy Himmerich, his aunt.

  “I don’t know how I got out in the hallway,” Kam Wixom said later. “And I don’t know why I turned north to those doors. I just found myself running.” When he realized he was outside and safe, he yelled, “I’m alive! I’m alive!” At the time, he thought he was running fast, but he explains “I guess my legs were starting to go rubbery. I saw a little first grader tear past me toward Main Street. Being panic-stricken helped him run like I’d never seen him before.”

  Music teacher John Miller was trying to dismantle the rest of the barricade that Janel Dayton had been working on when she tried to help Jean Mitchell and was nearly overcome by smoke. John was desperate to pull the last chairs and tables apart so the exit was clear.

  At that moment, David Young’s face appeared at the open restroom door. He was holding a .22 pistol in one hand and a .44 in the other. There was no recognition or reaction in his expression, but John knew, as he looked into David’s face, that he was in trouble. Instantly, he turned and ran. At first, there was no place to go. He heard the gunshot and felt it “thud.” Not certain he had actually been hit, he found his way outside and began to run. The smoke-free, clear spring air convinced him he was finally safe.

  But this euphoria didn’t last long. He began to feel more and more dizzy, even as he ran toward Main Street. He collapsed at the edge of Robinson’s yard, almost at Janel Dayton’s feet. Mrs. Dayton herself was still trying to catch her breath. Kam Wixom ran up just in time to see the EMTs sprint to Miller’s aid. Finding blood from a bullet wound below his right shoulder blade, they loaded him in a waiting ambulance and rushed to Bear Lake Memorial Hospital, over the border in Montpelier, Idaho.

  Watching near Kam was fellow student Brenda Hartley. Kam was shocked and startled to see her blackened face, but she turned out not to be so much burned as smothered in soot. The plastic decoration on her T-shirt had melted in the heat.

  Rocky Moore had finally pushed the last child he could see out the window. Still not sure just what to do, he decided to leave while he could. He took a deep breath and wriggled through the narrow opening, expecting to crash unceremoniously on the ground. Suddenly, he was caught. He felt a spurt of fear, imagining David Young approaching from behind, ready to wrestle him back into the room or shoot him as he tried to escape. Rocky looked back—there was no one—yet something was holding him fast.

  Suddenly, he recognized the loud crack of gunshots. Thinking it was David, he battled with panic, trying to get out. But David wasn’t there. What sounded like a spray of gunfire was in fact the hundreds of cartridges Young had lined up against the classroom wall. In the soaring temperatures of the burning room, they were starting to explode spontaneously. Feeling along the window frame, Rocky realized he had only been stopped by his belt, which had caught on the protruding window latch. He freed it and tumbled to the grass in a heap. The minutes he was entangled had seemed like hours.

  On the far side of the room, Eva Clark had been behind John Miller when she realized her daughter Kathy was not at her side. She had no choice but to grope back into the stifling, acrid, half-blinding conflagration if she wanted to find her youngster alive. But to do so, she also had to pass Doris Young. Eva realized Doris must have taken the bomb’s full force. She also knew there was nothing she could do for the woman who was suffering such agonizing pain. Her only duty now was to locate her four-year-old and escape. Poking around the room, she thought she saw a familiar form. Then the little girl reached up. “Mamma!” she cried. Eva pulled her daughter free and pushed toward the exit where her other children were waiting.

  There in the doorway was David, still holding a pistol in each hand. Eva knew she was completely defenseless—yet she thought she saw a look of surrender in his eyes that had not been there before. “I will never forget the man’s face,” she said, recalling the experience later. “It had the look of defeat. . . . His will to continue was shattered.” She waited no longer, but turned her back on him, shielding the children, and hurried with them out the door. No gunshot followed their retreat. Soon, they were at the end of the hallway and free.

  On the lawn, Rocky Moore had picked himself up and was glancing back through the window. He was amazed to see more youngsters arrive. This time, he pulled them through from the outside, and as he did, he saw someone who lifted his spirits greatly. It was Cindy Cowden, the young woman who was only in Cokeville that day because she wanted to teach elementary school. She had been on the far side of the room, and from her presence, Rocky knew that at least some of those closest to the bomb had survived. Then he saw student teacher Kris Kasper come around the comer of the outside wall—another person who had been in a different part of the room from Rocky. He felt more hopeful that others had survived too.

  Substitute teacher Pat Bennion was also at the windows, trying to lift children through. Badly hit by the fire flow down the wall when the bomb
went off, she was too busy helping the children climb out to notice that her arms had been seared. The skin was becoming more and more abraded by repeated lifting and pushing across the window frame. She would need expert medical care, and soon.

  One of the last to leave Room 4 was Verlene Bennion, the sixty-six-year-old teacher’s aide. She suffered second-degree burns on her arms and back and had to be treated for smoke inhalation as well. She remembers feeling a great desire, as she worked her way toward the door, for every person in the room to live at least as long as she had up to that moment.

  Once they were safely outside, some of the children living in town ran directly home without even looking to see if their parents were among the crowd milling around the school. Conversely, many parents had left home and come to the police barricade, simply unable to wait passively for news.

  Lowell Clark, alerted by his high school daughter, Beverly, was one in the crowd of some two hundred parents gathered outside the school grounds. He had no idea his wife, Eva, was inside the school with their children. Everyone nearby had heard the explosion. The sense of desperation and dread became more and more tangible as the seconds passed. Then Lowell saw and heard bewildered children stream from the school and run toward them, sometimes to the first adult they could recognize, sometimes just to anyone who would wrap them in a safe embrace. Parents found it hard to recognize their own youngsters behind the blackened faces with burned clothes and singed hair that came stumbling up to them.

  Lowell was amazed to see Eva leading their children from the school. How had she gotten there? But as he looked over his family with enormous relief and gratitude, his heart stopped. “Where’s Christy?” he asked his wife. Eva had no idea. Both of them immediately began asking around in case someone had seen her. Eva was frightened she was back there in that room full of debris and smoke, and possibly David Young. She couldn’t bear to think she might have saved five of her children, only to lose the sixth.