Oklahoma City, Okla.— Saturday marks 30 years since the Oklahoma City bombing. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
On the morning of April 19, 1995, Amy Downs remembers the sky in Oklahoma City as a perfect shade of blue.
"The red buds were all blooming, like it was a gorgeous spring morning," said Downs, 28 years old at the time.
Her husband had dropped her off in front of the federal building where she worked in a credit union for employees. She checked in with her best friend Sonja Sanders, who was headed into the CEO's office, then sat at her desk next to a big window overlooking downtown.
"And one of my coworkers, who was seven months pregnant, came and sat down beside me to ask me a question, and that's when the bomb went off," Downs said. "I heard screaming, then realized I was the one screaming. It's pitch black, I can strain to open my eyes. I can't move. I can barely breathe and it's hot and it stinks and it's burning my throat. And I remember wondering if I was dead or alive."
She didn't know it, but she was buried upside down under 10 feet of rubble, sandwiched between two slabs of concrete.
"And so at that point I really started experiencing what people talk about when they say they had life flashing before their eyes, just realizing that I had not really lived," Downs remembers.
Rescuers finally saw her hand sticking out of a pile of debris. After six and a half hours they pulled her out.
"I remember taking those first breaths of fresh air and just like promising God right then I will never live my life the same," Downs said.
Over the following days she learned 168 people died, including her best friend Sonja Sanders and 17 of her coworkers. A third of the Alfred P. Murrah building had been destroyed by a homemade bomb; a deadly combination of fertilizer, diesel fuel and other chemicals hidden in a Ryder truck parked outside.
The next day, the FBI dug up the rear axle of that truck, which eventually led them to Timothy McVeigh, an extreme nationalist angered by the Waco siege two years earlier. He was tried, convicted and executed in 2001.
Downs recovered from her injuries but remained heartbroken over the loss of her friends and overwhelmed with survivor's guilt. It was several weeks before she agreed to go to counseling.
"I went with like arms crossed, like I'm here because they're making me and I don't want to be here kind of thing," she said. "And it was the best thing I could've done."
She decided to follow through on some of the promises she made while trapped in the rubble— become a mom, go back to school and get healthy.
"I weighed 355 pounds," Downs said. "I had joined Weight Watchers so many times that I think I could be banned."
She decided to get surgery to reduce the size of her stomach and started riding her bike.
Ten years after the bombing, Downs was asked to volunteer at a memorial race for the victims.
"Well, I'm all emotional and moved because I'm seeing people cross the finish line, like old people, people with one leg, blade runners," she said. "I'm like, oh my gosh. And I'm thinking if they can do it, I can do it. So I tell everybody I am gonna run next year. I'm gonna run in honor of Sonja."
And that's what she did. Then she found more races to run.
For her 50th birthday, Downs decided she wanted to do something epic, so she signed up for Ironman Arizona—a 2.4-mile swim, a 120-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run.
She hired a trainer and found friends who were competing. Her goal: to finish. On race day, she watched people bow out with injuries and doubted herself. She slogged through the day's events all the way to the last mile of the run, sore and ready to collapse.
"But I could see the lights of the stadium," she said.
That's when someone in a golf cart approached her, asking for her number. She knew officials would disqualify her if she didn't make the cutoff time.
"And I hear 'Amy Downs has done it, she's coming in," Downs tearfully recalls. "'Let's let her hear you make some noise!' And I hear this roar come from this stadium at midnight, y'all, midnight. These people are still there. I'm the last one."
Today, Amy Downs is the author of the book Hope Is A Verb: My Journey Of Impossible Transformation. She's also a mother and the CEO of the credit union she saw destroyed in 1995, and where she hired her best friend Sonja Sanders' daughter, Savanna, to work as a teller and then helped her become an FBI agent.
Copyright 2025 NPR