That Sunday morning broke clear across the countryside near Waco, Texas, but the chill in the air foreshadowed a cold front that would roll through later.
It was the kind of latewinter morningthatseemed made especially for wideopen Central Texas. Crisp enough for a jacket and a mug of coffee, but not cold enoughtomakeyouchange your plans for the day.
About the time that church-goingfamilieswere settling into their pews and Sunday school rooms for a morning of worship, events of a different nature were starting to unfold a few miles east of town, near the community of Elk.
It was Feb. 28, 1993, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was planning a military-style assault on a religious compound known as Mount Carmel, whose residents weretheBranchDavidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
By the time the cold front came through that afternoon, the ATF and the Branch Davidians would face each other in a gunfight that made Waco a household name and led to the needless deaths of hundreds of men, women and children.
FourATF agents and five Davidians died in the initial gunfight and another Davidian was killed later that day. After a 51-day siege, 76 Davidians died when the compound went up in flames on April 19. Two years later, another 168 people died when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City as his response to the government’s actions in Waco.
The Davidians had lived in and around Waco for decadesandwereknownas a benign, if bizarre, group, but that changed in the late 1980s, when a young man namedVernonHowelltook control.
He changed his name to David Koresh and then changed the fundamental nature of the Davidians, dissolving marriages in the group, taking the women he wanted and having sex with girls as young as 12 years old.
At the compound, Koresh’s followers lived an austere life, but he didn’t. He had an air-conditioned apartment in the compound whilehisfollowersendured the hot Texas summers without.Arock guitarist, he frequented music stores in Wacoandoftenwasintown while most of his followers stayed at Mount Carmel.
He also preached that the government would someday attack the Davidians, and he began arming his followers in preparation for that cataclysmic day.
In 1992, theATF became aware of the Davidians when a box delivered to them broke, exposing hand grenade casings. The ATF began an investigation that led to the Feb. 28 assault.
About the same time, our newspaper – the Waco Tribune-Herald – began what turned out to be its own investigation.
As the city editor, I had badgered reporter Mark England for a Sunday feature story on something. I didn’t care what. He was a good writer and would make whatever he wrote about interesting.
“Icanprobablygetsomething on the Branch Davidians,” he said.
Come Friday of that week, he said he needed a little more time. And he said the same thing the next Friday. And the next.
By the time his story was finished almost a year later, he had been joined in the project by another reporter, Darlene McCormick, and by assistant city editor Becky Gregory, who guided most of their work and gave form to their series, which became known as The Sinful Messiah.
Although the series mentioned guns, the greater focus was on Koresh’s crimes against people, particularly sexual and physical abuse.
“If you are a Branch Davidian, Christ lives on a threadbare piece of land 10 miles east of Waco,” was the opening sentence of the series.
“He has dimples, claims a ninth-grade education, married his legal wife when she was 14, enjoys a beer now and then, plays a mean guitar, reportedly packs a 9mm Glock and keeps an arsenal of military assault rifles, and willingly admits that he is a sinner without equal.”
It was excellent work and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.
By early February 1993, the ATF became aware of the work Mark and Darlene were doing and asked the newspaper to delay publication, but offered no specifics about plans to arrest Koresh.
Publisher Randy Preddy eventually made the decision to publish the Sinful Messiah as a series, with the first installment running on Feb. 27.
That same week, a Tribune- Herald reporter received a tip that the ATF planned to “do something” regarding Koresh on Monday, March 1, but then learned it had been moved a day earlier, to Feb 28.
Feb. 28 was a Sunday, so all the newspaper’s staff was available to cover whatever unfolded. I picked the reporters and photographersIwantedand we met at the newspaper office that morning, then drove to Mount Carmel to see what would happen.
For a long time, nothing happened.
Darlene and I were parked behind a ridge on Double EE Ranch Road where we could see the compound but would be difficult to spot.
There were no Davidians outside and the compound was quiet. Everyone might be indoors for worship, I thought.
Twothingshappenedthat seemed odd at the time. A dark Chevrolet pickup suddenly roared out the Mount Carmel driveway and into the driveway of a house across the road.
Some time later, a small pickup drove by and we heard a transmission on the police scanner: “No guns in the windows. Tell them it’s a go.”
By that time, although we didn’t know it, events had passed the point of turning back.
The ATF had assembled its raid team of about 75 agents, who were at nearby Texas State Technical Center and were preparing to load into two cattle trailers to go to the compound for a military-style assault to arrest Koresh.
Meanwhile, a local television station had been tipped to the raid and one of its photographers was driving the backroads around Mount Carmel, lost.
He encountered a man in a mail truck, stopped to ask him if he knew where Mount Carmel was and inadvertently tipped him that authorities were coming.
The mail man was David Jones, Koresh’s brother-inlaw, and he immediately went to the compound to tell Koresh what was happening.
Robert Rodriguez was an undercover ATF agent who had posed as a college student interested in Koresh’s beliefs and was in the compound when David Jones arrived.
He later testified before Congress that Koresh returned from talking to Jones and told him: “They’re coming, Robert. The time has come.”
Rodriguez found an excuse to leave, jumped into his dark Chevy pickup, roared out the driveway and into the driveway of the house across the street, which was an undercover house and was to be used by ATF snipers later that morning.
He testified that he called his boss, Chuck Sarabyn.
“The first thing that came out of my mouth was, ‘Chuck, they know! They know! They know we’re coming!” he said.
Less than an hour later, two cattle trailers loaded with agents rolled up the same driveway that Rodriguez had left. Despite knowing that the Davidians knew it was coming, raid leaders ordered the assault to proceed.
Seconds after the agents began piling out of the trailers, the first shots were fired.You could hear a pop, a couple of pops, then a burst of pops, and then the entire compound erupted in gunfire.
The first pops sounded muffled, as if they were comingfromthebackofthe compound. Agents hadn’t had time to get around that far, so it is most likely that it was Davidians shooting at helicopters that were sent as a diversion.
My first thought was: “He’s running, and they’re shooting at him.”
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The Davidians had made the most of their warning and were prepared to resist with violence the government agentswhowerecoming for them, just as Koresh had said they would.
The agents who went on the raid showed courage of the highest order. They knew that the Davidians knew they were coming, yet they followed their orders to climb into the cattle trailers.
The raid itself was the first tangible evidence for the Davidians that Koresh’s prophecies were coming true, but it wasn’t the first time that the ATF made a wrong decision about the Davidians.
The ATF could have arrested Koresh practically any time it wanted. He often went into Waco and he was known to jog on the country roads around Mount Carmel. There was noneedtomountamilitarystyle assault, one that confirmed Koresh’s prophecy and cemented his authority for any doubters who might have remained among the Davidians.
On the day of the fire April 19 - the FBI provided the final confirmation when it sent tanks to crash down the compound walls and insert tear gas.
It has been 30 years since the raid and I have two lingering, vivid images.
One is of watching the agents on the north side of the compound as the raid began. Several of them ran in a single line, dressed in dark clothes, bent at the waist, following their orders into heavy gunfire.
The other was from about six months after the fire. I went by myself to Mount Carmel one afternoon. Charred boards and trash littered the compound.There were plastic bottles, papers, a pink bicycle, random bits of debris.
And there was a girl’s doll, scorched but not destroyed. It didn’t seem right to pick it up, for some reason, but I wondered about the little girl who might have been holding the doll on that Sunday morning when the raid began, and I wondered if she might have been holding it again the day the fire started.
I wondered about a little girl with a doll whose world was caught in a vise between people she trusted and people she had never met.
A little girl with a doll who died because of a man who said he was the Messiah.