Sitting in his cubicle the morning of April 19, 1995, on the ground floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Dennis Purifoy remembers seeing the flash of an explosion on his computer screen. He remembers falling from his chair and being covered by debris that blocked out all the light.
Purifoy’s desk sat at the opposite end of the building from where a truck exploded. He believes the cubicles between him and the explosion shielded him from some of its devastating effects. Sixteen of Purifoy’s co-workers were killed in the blast and 24 people visiting the Social Security office where he worked were killed that morning.
“There was just so much destruction,” Purifoy told @JudyWoodruffPBS. “The floors above it pancaked down and there was one — one of my coworkers that died was 15, 20 feet from me, but she was standing up, so she was hit [by] some debris and she died.”
Purifoy survived the largest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, when far-right extremist Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck outside the federal building. The attack resulted in the deaths of 168 people, including 19 children.
Purifoy didn’t have a good understanding of hate before that day. “I was naïve and innocent like most people were, I think, he said. “And a lot of people still are.”
Now, Purifoy hopes that law enforcement agencies pay enough attention to far-right extremism brewing in the country. Nor is there enough discussion about it, he said.
“I think it’s out of sight, out of mind for most people. And most of us in America, we don’t want to think of our fellow citizens as being capable of terrorism — but they are,” he said. “And I think there’s an element too, in our current society of the divisions and polarizations in the tribal thinking that we’re in now, where it’s a lot easier for people to think it’s me or us versus them and whoever the ‘them’ is. I’m more worried about that today than I have been in a while.”
This video was produced and edited by Frank Carlson, Adam Kemp, Julia Griffin, Joshua Barajas and Dan Cooney.
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