Kathy Sanders

At one point in her life, Kathy Sanders wished she could take April 19 off the calendar.

That was the day in 1995 when her two grandsons, Chase and Colton Smith, were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, the largest domestic terrorist attack up to that time in U.S. history. The bombing resulted in the deaths of 168 people and more than 500 injured. It also was the day the nation's sense of safety was altered forever, Sanders said.

"What you were doing and where you were the day of the bombing is kind of like the [John F. Kennedy assassination]," Sanders said. "It's etched in our souls."

Sanders, who later met and married Tom Sanders, a financial planner in Little Rock and moved to Arkansas, now lives in Hot Springs Village. She recently spoke at the Little Rock Country Club, just days before the 24th anniversary of the bombing.

While the details of what happened that day haven't changed, what happened for Sanders afterward is a journey through faith that took her from grief, shock and anger to healing and forgiveness, a path that she describes in her 2014 book, Now You See Me: How I Forgave the Unforgivable.

RAISED 'TO LOVE THE LORD'

Sanders, an Oklahoma native, recalled her upbringing in Del City, Okla., a suburb of Oklahoma City, where she was raised with her brother by loving parents in a home that deeply affirmed the Baptist faith.

"My mom and dad were the June and Ward Cleaver of Del City," Sanders said. "They were just good old salt-of-the-earth Southern Baptist folks."

"I was taught to love the Lord at a very young age ... I had a sister that died [when] I was 4 years old, so I was acutely aware of death, and I wanted to go to heaven."

In 1995, Sanders, then Kathy Wilburn, was happily married and living in northwest Oklahoma City with her husband, Glenn Wilburn. Her daughter, Edye Smith, was recently divorced and had moved home with her two young sons, Chase and Colton Smith. Mother and daughter worked in the same building in downtown Oklahoma City, three blocks from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where the boys stayed at the day care center during the workday.

Everything in Sanders' home revolved around her grandsons. On that day in April 1995, Chase was three weeks away from his fourth birthday; Colton had turned 2 in February.

"They were the light of our lives," Sanders said. "[Chase and Colton] were more than grandchildren. [Edye] and I co-parented those kids."

Smith had been sick in the days leading up to the bombing, and would otherwise have stayed home that day and kept the children with her, but a co-worker implored her to come in briefly for a joint birthday celebration at the office.

Sanders was sitting at her desk when she heard the blast. She got up and ran down the two flights of stairs to her daughter's office, where Smith was a secretary for the Internal Revenue Service. All of the employees were looking out the office windows to see what had happened when one hung up the phone and announced that a building had been blown up.

"When we got into the street it was like we had entered the 'Twilight Zone,'" Sanders said. "There wasn't a car moving in the street. There were big sheets of plate glass falling down all around us from the buildings around us."

Sanders and her daughter were surrounded by what would eventually be determined to be $632 million in damage.

A new wave of explosions brought mother and daughter to the north side of the federal building, where cars were exploding.

"Where the day care once was, when we turned around, there on the second floor was nothing left but a pancake pile of rubble," Sanders said. "That's when my daughter fell to her knees, 'My babies! My babies!'"

Sanders and Smith were eventually directed to a hospital, where she gave photos of her grandsons to a nurse so the boys could be identified if they were brought in.

Her son, Danny Coss, was a police officer and promised that he would find out what had happened to the boys. He later found Chase toe-tagged in the back of a truck that had been used as a makeshift morgue. A rescue worker found Colton crying among the rubble, but the worker realized he couldn't help the boy because a large shard of glass was lodged deep in his abdomen.

The rescue worker laid Colton on a bench beside the rubble from which he'd unearthed the boy, and placed a cover on him; Colton's body was the first that Coss discovered in his search, Sanders said.

Sanders still remembers returning home -- the two car seats in her vehicle now empty -- and turning on the TV to see a parent of a child who had survived holding their son in the hospital.

"They said, 'You know, I just prayed and asked God for my little boy to hold, and God answered my prayers and and here's my boy,'" Sanders said. "That was like a punch in the gut, [and] I would have been doing the same thing if that had been me.

"I've since learned I don't believe that God is a cherry picker," Sanders added. "I don't think God [says], 'You know, I think I'll take this child and I'll take this one, and I'll save this one and let all those others perish.'"

Edye Smith's birthday was two days after the bombing. Sanders spent the day with her daughter picking out a casket for Chase and Colton. Their funeral was held days later after the FBI released their bodies.

"I'd be lying to you if I told you that when I saw that little casket lowered into the ground, my belief system wasn't shaken," said Sanders, who in her pain contemplated suicide after the death of her grandsons.

A REVELATION

It was while hearing John Walsh, creator and host of the TV show America's Most Wanted, speak to a group of survivors that Sanders began to feel hope.

Walsh had been hired to host the show seven years after his 6-year-old son, Adam Walsh, was abducted and killed in 1981.

"[Walsh] had his finger pointing ... he said, 'You will grieve and you will grieve deeply, but you will survive,'" Sanders said. It was at that point that she "chose life."

In choosing life, Sanders also sought answers to mysteries that surrounded the bombing, such as questioning the presence of the bomb squad in the area that morning, but being told there had been no advance warning about the bomb.

Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and eventually executed for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing, had been spotted with a second man by 22 eyewitnesses beforehand, but Sanders said the FBI had said there was no "John Doe No. 2."

Sanders' husband, Glenn, was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Angry at McVeigh and with the government because he didn't believe he had been given the truth concerning the bombing, Glenn died full of bitterness and anger at 47, a little more than two years after the bombing.

It was shortly after Glenn's death that Sanders -- who had a neighbor attend alleged bomber Timothy McVeigh's trial while she cared for her dying husband -- moved to Denver for the trial of Terry Nichols, a conspirator of McVeigh's who was ultimately handed 161 life sentences.

"It was at [Nichols'] trial that I took my first baby step towards learning to forgive something I never planned on," Sanders said.

Seeing a petite lady who she said reminded her of Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show, Sanders went over and introduced herself to Nichols' mother, Joyce Wilt.

"We began to sit together in the courtroom, and we began to eat lunch together, and you know it wasn't long before 'Terry Nichols the bomber' became 'my friend Joyce's son,'" Sanders said.

Upon returning to Oklahoma, where Nichols was to be tried after the Colorado trial ended in a hung jury, Sanders received a letter from Nichols -- the last person she wanted to hear from.

"I got to thinking ... who's going to know more about the bombing than the bomber?" said Sanders, who decided to befriend the then-alleged terrorist. "[At] that time in my life I was willing to dance with the devil to hear the truth."

After an exchange of letters, Nichols sent her his phone number, and in time Sanders began to visit Nichols in the Oklahoma County Jail.

Nichols had been raised in a Christian home, he told Sanders, but he and his family attended church only for funerals and weddings. When Nichols was arrested and held in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution Reformatory in El Reno, Okla., a Gideon Bible had been the only book in his cell.

Nichols said he read it cover to cover, and had tuned in to a radio preacher on an AM radio who'd said that if he would invite Jesus into his heart, he would be cleansed of his sins.

"Now I'm not anybody's judge, and I know I've heard of jailhouse religion where people profess to be Christians to make it good with the parole board," Sanders said. "I know there's certainly no atheist in the foxhole, and Terry Nichols certainly was in a foxhole, but I chose to believe him."

Sanders said April 19 is now a day of celebrating Chase and Colton's lives.

"Learning to forgive changed my life," Sanders said. "I realized that God did not take my grandchildren. He simply received them."

"I believe today that the unwillingness to forgive is at the heart of every human conflict," Sanders said. "We need to incorporate forgiveness at every level of our lives. Someone once told me, 'Well, you know what? Terry Nichols didn't deserve mercy.' I thought about it. No, he didn't. But if he had deserved it, it wouldn't be mercy, would it?

"We need to extend that kind of mercy to people."

NAN Profiles on 05/12/2019