I was there, and I remember the Oklahoma City bombing

On April 19, 1995, I was working at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center when the five-story building that housed my office shuddered simultaneously with a dull concussion at 9:02 a.m. The campus was located about a mile from downtown Oklahoma City, and it took only a few minutes for someone in our office to alert us that something had occurred at a downtown building. From our vantage point on the fourth floor, we could see a black plume of smoke hanging over the skyline. An office TV soon provided early aerial video from news helicopters at the scene, revealing — through the dense smoke from multiple car fires surrounding the site — only the back half of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, mortally crippled, a pile of rubble where the facade only moments earlier looked out onto 5th Street, a busy thoroughfare that was then a crater. We could only imagine the number of casualties, and there was plenty of speculation about what caused the explosion. No one imagined it was what it turned out to be.