Oklahoma
‘We Will Never Forget’
OKLAHOMA CITY — The last week or two, I started…
‘Most severely injured’ OKC bombing survivor overcomes evil with good
On the terrorist attack's 30th anniversary, Susan Walton praises God for showing ‘the goodness of people.’
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OKLAHOMA CITY — Thirty years have not healed all of Susan Walton’s wounds.
Still, the Oklahoma City bombing survivor’s Christian faith remains strong.
“God brought a lot of good,” Walton, 74, said of the aftermath of the April 19, 1995, attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building — which claimed 168 lives and wounded hundreds of others.
At the three-decade anniversary, the longtime North MacArthur Church of Christ member still walks with a cane.
“And still today, getting up out of a chair is not easy,” she said in an interview at the church.
Survivor Susan Walton reflects on the 30th anniversary of the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
Buried under rubble and critically hurt when the bomb exploded that blue-sky Wednesday, Walton was “the most severely injured of those who survived,” according to Oklahoma City’s KFOR-TV.
All these years later, Walton enumerates her injuries without notes.
“A basilar skull fracture. Nerve damage behind both eyes. A broken nose. Lost six teeth. My jaw was fractured in six places. Ruptured spleen. And then my legs were messed up,” she told The Christian Chronicle.
‘We Will Never Forget’: Bobby Ross Jr. recounts covering the 1995 bombing
Her initial recovery process took five years and required 26 surgeries. Doctors fused her left ankle to her foot, preventing any movement. But even that she counts as a blessing.
“Thank goodness it wasn’t my gas-pedal foot,” she said. “I can still drive.”
Despite her challenges, Walton exemplifies the teaching of Romans 12:21, North MacArthur preaching minister Tim Lewis said: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Tim Lewis preaches for the North MacArthur Church of Christ in Oklahoma City.
“Her story is remarkable,” Lewis said. “It’s hard to imagine the pain she endured, just being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Yet Walton does not display any bitterness, the minister said. “And then she takes this terrible tragedy and turns it into a way to help people.”
Now retired, Walton started a nonprofit called Suited for Success after the bombing. Over a 25-year period, she helped more than 10,000 low-income women achieve — as the nonprofit describes it — “self-sufficiency by providing professional clothing and career development services.”
The Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum chose the 30th anniversary theme “A Day of Darkness, Years of Light” to commemorate the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
“April 19, 1995, was a day of darkness, but Susan Walton and survivors just like her decided years of light would follow,” said Kari Watkins, the memorial’s president and CEO. “These survivors continue to make an impact and are defined by strength and hope.”
At least four members of Churches of Christ — Andrea Yvette Blanton, Diana Lynne Day, Derwin Miller and Ronota Ann Newberry-Woodbridge — died in the bombing, according to the Chronicle’s archives. A 1995 story listed Walton as hospitalized in serious condition but said she was “expected to eventually recover.”
“April 19, 1995, was a day of darkness, but Susan Walton and survivors just like her decided years of light would follow.”
A community prayer service four days after the bombing helped bring Oklahoma and the nation together in 1995, and faith “has played an important role in our healing,” Watkins said.
“We don’t run from it,” she said of Oklahoma City’s focus on faith. “It’s a part of who we are and why, I think, we’ve done so well.”
Kari Watkins, right, president and CEO of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, hosted a recent panel discussion on cities impacted by terrorism.
Bomb shatters ‘a pretty spring morning’
The day of the bombing, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh parked a yellow Ryder rental truck filled with 5,000 pounds of explosives outside the nine-story federal building and got into a getaway car. The timed fuse ignited at 9:02 a.m.
McVeigh and co-conspirator Terry Nichols were convicted in the bombing. McVeigh was executed in 2001. Nichols remains behind bars, serving a life sentence in federal prison in Florence, Colo.
“For some reason, this man felt he had something to prove by blowing up people,” Walton said.
That morning, she dropped off her late husband, Richard, at his accounting office — his car was in the shop — and headed downtown to the Federal Employees Credit Union to make a deposit.
“I was just zipping along, and it was a pretty spring morning,” recalled Walton, then 44 and studying American Sign Language — a skill she thought might lend itself to a new career after losing her job with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
“We’d already sent our taxes in and didn’t have the money in there to cover the check,” she explained. “I thought, ‘I’m not writing a hot check to the IRS.’”
That’s why she came to the credit union on the third floor of the federal building. Walton — baptized as a teen at the Southwest Church of Christ in Oklahoma City — has no memory of the explosion.
She woke up in the hospital that afternoon and eventually pieced together what happened to her.
Rescuers found her under a file cabinet and a door frame.
“I had gone into the hospital as a Jane Doe, and they had already done surgery on me by the time Richard found me,” said Walton, who was intubated. “That’s another thing — you know how the Lord works in mysterious ways. I was able to communicate through sign language because I couldn’t talk.”
Walton later testified in the sentencing phases of McVeigh’s and Nichols’ federal trials in Denver.
“Susan Walton was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair, her leg bolted together in a wire cage,” The Associated Press reported during Nichols’ 1997 trial. “Jurors stared uncomfortably as she pulled her dress up to show how her bones were being reformed so she could someday walk.”
Asked why she decided to testify, Walton told the Chronicle, “I think (prosecutors) were just wanting people to see what the bombing had done to my life.”
Survivor Susan Walton speaks to the news media in 1997 as they leave the U.S. Courthouse in Denver after hearing the guilty verdict in the federal trial of bomber Timothy McVeigh.
‘No wrinkles by these eyes’
Walton maintains her sense of humor even as she remembers the dark days after the bombing.
When Richard found her at the hospital, he leaned close to her swollen face and whispered, “Sweetheart, we’re here.”
Remembering the scene later, he told her, “You smiled real big. And I recognized you by the wrinkles by your eyes.”
“You must be talking to the wrong person,” she said she replied. “There are no wrinkles by these eyes.”
She recalled, too, that she wasn’t pleased to wake up with an altered nose.
“It was not my nose,” she said with a chuckle. “Apparently, it was one of the more popular noses of the time, but it wasn’t my cute little nose. So it did kind of change my looks a little bit.”
President Bill Clinton greets Oklahoma City bombing victim Susan Walton at a 1996 event marking the attack’s first anniversary.
She paused just a few moments as she turned more serious and lamented her occasional pity parties.
“That sounds so silly, you know,” she said of concern for her nose. “But then you stop and think, ‘Well, I’ll never jump or run or be able to get out and play with the grandbabies too much like I would have before.’”
Between them, Richard, who died in 2015, and Susan count four adult children, 10 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
“I lost Richard, and then came COVID,” Walton said.
“To my knowledge, I never had it,” she said of the virus. “But it really slowed things down … and it just kind of took all the wind out of my sails.”
After the bombing, she relied for years on a wheelchair, then a walker, then crutches before finally turning to a cane. She never had fallen until last autumn when she slipped at her home and tore her rotator cuff.
“Since the fall, I don’t feel as stable as I used to,” she said. “I stay home and go to church online most of the time, even though there’s nothing stopping me from coming.”
No doubt, her physical limitations make getting around difficult.
“It’s just easier,” she said of staying home. “I’m trying to get over that.”
She loves her church family.
Visitors pause and reflect at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.
They were there for her during her months of hospitalization and rehabilitation. They have been there for her since.
They love her, too.
“The light of the world, the salt of the earth — that’s Susan,” said Lewis, the preacher. “I mean, she’s just a neat lady.
“I’m sure there are quiet moments, like for everybody, where she just really hurts over all of it,” he added. “But for the most part, she’s just been super upbeat and positive about her life.”
“The light of the world, the salt of the earth — that’s Susan. I mean, she’s just a neat lady.”
Despite McVeigh’s evil intent, Walton said, God used the bombing’s aftermath “to show the goodness of people.”
Even 30 years later, she dabs her tears with a tissue as she remembers her first service back at North MacArthur after the attack. Fellow Christians reserved a pew for her — with her name attached to keep anyone from taking it.
“That first Sunday back, I could have sworn the angels were singing,” she said, her voice choking with emotion. “It was just so beautiful.”
BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He covered the Oklahoma City bombing for The Oklahoman in 1995. Reach him at [email protected].
