Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 23, 1995 TAG: 9504250032
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: OKLAHOMA CITY LENGTH: Long
To an angry nation, he's a scowling face emerging from a country courthouse, surrounded by police.
Those who knew Timothy McVeigh before he became a suspect in the bombing here offer a complex, contradictory portrait: a canny boy who would surely ``go somewhere,'' then an unremarkable student, and later a straight-arrow soldier but also ``a subdued loner'' in his Gulf War infantry unit.
In recent years, acquaintances say, he befriended tax protesters and other anti-government types and his politics turned to the far right. He claimed that the Army had implanted a computer chip in his buttocks. He visited Waco, Texas, and returned angry. And he never went anywhere unarmed.
``He's always looking over his shoulder,'' said Carl Brocker of Decker, Mich., where McVeigh spent time off and on in recent years with Army buddy Terry Nichols, now being held as a witness.
Neighbors said McVeigh often drove his car around town loaded with guns and ammunition for sale.
``He was a drifter,'' said Mary Ann Saenen. ``He was very militant and always carried a weapon.''
The manager of an Arizona trailer park where McVeigh lived for five months last year said he never saw any guns, but evicted McVeigh and his pregnant girlfriend last June after a series of arguments over loud music, the couple's dog and the wrecked car McVeigh refused to have towed away.
``He said he just got out of the Army, and he'd had enough of rules and regulations,'' said Bob Ragin of the Canyon West Mobile and RV Park in Kingman.
Timothy James McVeigh, arrested on a weapons charge in Perry, Okla., within 80 minutes of Wednesday's bombing, was born April 23, 1968, and grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, N.Y.
A neighbor during his boyhood, Pat Waugh, recalls McVeigh as a child with promise. ``That kid is going to go somewhere,'' she said to herself, watching his neighborhood money-making schemes - a gambling casino or haunted house to draw the kids down the block.
When he was about 10, McVeigh's family split up, his mother moving away with a younger sister. He, his father and an older sister moved to a smaller house, Waugh said.
His father still lives in Pendleton, N.Y., where McVeigh graduated from high school in 1986. He was described as a good student; in his high school yearbook, he listed talking, computers and cars as his interests. He also played basketball. Classmate Wendy Stephany said he was quiet and friendly.
McVeigh entered the military after high school and left the area. Military records have been closed as the investigation proceeds, but his comrades say McVeigh was in the Army from around 1989 to 1992, serving at Fort Riley, Kan., and in the Persian Gulf War, where he was a Bradley vehicle gunner and a sergeant.
``He was a good soldier. If he was given a mission and a target, it's gone,'' said James Ives, another sergeant in his Army infantry unit.
Ives agreed with the recollection of another soldier, Robert Copeland of Aurora, Colo., who described McVeigh as a loner who rarely joined others after hours, but didn't seem strange. And he was a hard worker, they said.
During the Gulf War, McVeigh had seen what explosives can do, Ives said. ``I remember Kuwaiti and Iraqi villages that had been blown away ... little kids, women, children,'' Ives said.
Training on his own time, marching with a pack weighing up to 100 pounds, McVeigh hoped to join the Army Special Forces but was injured during his tryout, failed, and was ``extremely disappointed,'' Ives said.
Ives said other ex-comrades told him McVeigh became involved with off-post political groups with strong anti-government views toward the end of his military career. He could not identify the groups, saying only, ``militias ... cults is what I call them.''
Phil Morowski, an acquaintance, said that when McVeigh returned from the Gulf War, he complained that the Army had implanted a computer chip in his buttocks, apparently to keep track of him.
One of McVeigh's fellow servicemen was Terry Nichols, and after living for a time in Kansas - a Fort Riley address appears on McVeigh's driver's license through November 1993 - McVeigh went to Decker, Mich., where he worked on a farm owned by Nichols' brother James, who also is being held as a witness by the FBI.
There, acquaintances say, McVeigh's anti-government views fit in well.
An unidentified member of the right-wing Michigan Militia group told Detroit-area station WXYZ-TV that McVeigh was at a Michigan Militia meeting in Jackson, Mich., in January. Speakers talked of the need to take action against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the station said.
Officials of the Michigan Militia said neither Nichols nor McVeigh belongs to their group. They said they were unsure there had been such a meeting.
McVeigh ``was known to hold extreme right-wing views ... and was particularly agitated about the conduct of the federal government at Waco, Texas, in 1993,'' said an FBI affidavit attached to the charge against him.
It said he visited the site of the gun battles and siege between federal agents and the Branch Davidian sect, and expressed anger at the deaths there.
In McVeigh's old haunts, anger about the bombing runs as deep as anywhere.
In his hometown, resident Jim Argo said, ``Put him out in the woods, and we'll hunt him down.''
by CNB