For the first time in 20 years Denton County Sheriff Will Travis will visit Oklahoma City this weekend and visit the site of a horror that shaped his career and life forever.
On April 19, 1995, Travis was one of the emergency workers that responded to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
According to the F.B.I., at 9:02 a.m. on that Wednesday morning a Ryder Truck packed with 5,000 pounds of explosives rigged as a bomb went off in front of the building, killing 168 people, the youngest of which was 4 months old, and injuring hundreds more.
Travis was in his early 30s at the time and still a fairly young agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration assigned to the Fort Worth office.
"We got the call, probably about 9:15, or my bosses did, and told us, 'Hey, you all are going up there,'" said Sheriff Travis.
Travis and his fellow special agents took their personal vehicles and went immediately without packing for any sort of extended trip, not knowing at the time they had a three-week mission ahead of them.
Upon arrival, his team quickly discovered how bad the attack was.
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"It was horrible,” he said. "You just can't even fathom walking around the corner of some of these buildings and seeing this building that has just been cratered in two."
Five of Travis’s DEA co-workers were in the building that morning. He and his team began the search for them but found a much bigger job inside the wreckage.
He recalls rounding corners and finding body parts that had to be recovered as well as the hundreds of injured people inside. Travis said nearly every wall had at least some manure coating it from the homemade explosive that went off.
The memory that still chokes the sheriff up most though was the sight of the children that had been at daycare in the building when the attack happened. Fifteen of those kids died in the explosion, and a total of 19 children lost their lives.
"Seeing the kids,” said Travis, “just seeing their lifeless bodies and knowing that they'll never see their parents again, that was hard on us, and it was almost harder on us than finding our own people."
Emergency workers dug through the wreckage non-stop for several sleepless nights. Travis barely remembers leaving the building wreckage at all for days other than to help remove casualties while firefighters lined up and saluted each one.
"We had told the family members we're not going to come out until we find everybody,” he said.
In total Travis would spend three weeks at the site working and comforting families. He has never returned there, until this weekend when he’ll mark the 20th anniversary with survivors and those same families he once worked tirelessly to help.
"I always told myself I'd never return there once we left there, so to see it, is just going to be something different,” he said.
The emergency workers will meet with those families on Saturday and Sunday and mark the moment the attack happened at the now standing memorial in Oklahoma City on Sunday morning.
"I'm really looking forward to seeing the family members and how their lives have changed, and just be there for them,” said Travis.
Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier were all charged in the attack, and McVeigh was eventually executed on June 11, 2001, for the crime.
The FBI has put together a special website commemorating the 20th anniversary that features testimonies from other first responders to the scene.
