Key McVeigh Witness Alters Bombing Story
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DENVER — What was supposed to have been a major coup for defense lawyers in the Oklahoma City bombing trial Friday instead generated only confusion when a key witness changed her story about who she saw leaving a Ryder rental truck moments before a bomb blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
Defense lawyers at one point had expected her to testify that she saw a single “olive-skinned” man get out of the truck and walk away. That recollection would have been very helpful to the case of defendant Timothy J. McVeigh, who is fair-skinned.
But when Daina Bradley took the stand on Friday, appearing confused and disoriented, she said she had seen two men. One had olive skin, she said. The other was a light-skinned man who got out of the driver’s side door of the yellow Ryder rental truck.
Bradley, a troubled woman who lost several close family members and a leg in the bombing, gave a rambling, often disjointed tale about what she remembers from the seconds before the 9:02 a.m. blast.
She also told the jury that she spent much of her life in a mental facility, and that the trauma of April 19, 1995, has only increased her paranoia.
Because government prosecutors did not come up with a witness who could positively place McVeigh at the scene of the bombing, the defense had hoped that testimony from the 21-year-old Bradley would be the only eyewitness account about whether McVeigh is directly responsible for the worst mass murder in U.S. history.
Instead, the defense found out that Bradley changed her story last week after a meeting with prosecutors. McVeigh’s lawyers decided to call her to the stand anyway because her description of the olive-skinned man fits that of the mysterious John Doe 2, who, authorities first believed, accompanied McVeigh to rent the Ryder truck. It also fits earlier defense testimony that a second person was seen at the Ryder rental agency and the motel where McVeigh stayed days before the bombing.
Defense attorney Cheryl Ramsey sought to clarify Bradley’s statements and get her to testify that McVeigh was neither of the men she saw the morning of the blast.
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“You have never said that Timothy McVeigh was the person who got out of the truck,” Ramsey said. “Have you?”
“No,” Bradley answered.
Bradley said that both men left the area very quickly and headed in different directions. About the light-complected man, she said: “He walked off very fast across the street.”
Ramsey then reminded Bradley of a series of statements she had made to McVeigh’s defense team and the FBI in which she repeatedly insisted she had never seen a light-skinned man at all.
But, Bradley added, “I don’t even remember half of the things I said when they did the interview.”
In fact, in her earlier statements about seeing just one man, she maintained that he reminded her of the so-called John Doe 2 figure.
“I recall telling them it was an olive-complexion man with short hair, curly, clean-cut,” she said Friday. “He had on a blue starter jacket, blue jeans and tennis shoes, and a white hat with purple flames.”
The hat matches that in the John Doe 2 description. An employee at the Junction City, Kan., Ryder agency told the FBI the man wore a hat with flames or stripes on the side--similar to the logo for the Carolina Panthers professional football team.
Under cross-examination by Pat Ryan, the U.S. attorney in Oklahoma City, Bradley said she has had memory problems for a long time. Those problems were exacerbated by the bombing, which took the lives of her two children, Gabreon Bruce and Peachyln Bradley, and her mother, Cheryl Hammon, and critically injured her sister, Felicia Bradley.
In addition, Bradley lost a leg when rescue workers were forced to amputate the limb to extricate her from the bomb debris.
“You can tell me one thing one week, and I would forget it the next week,” she said.
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She added that by the time she was 16, she already had spent nine years in a mental health center. “It caused me to lose memory of who I was and people around me,” she said.
Also testifying Friday was Todd Bunting, a former soldier at Ft. Riley, Kan., who, the government contends, Ryder shop employees mistook for a second man with McVeigh.
Bunting testified that he accompanied an Army buddy to the Ryder shop on the day after McVeigh was there, and that he wore his favorite headgear--a Carolina Panthers cap.
He said he was investigated by the FBI and eventually cleared. And for some time, he said, he and his Army buddies joked that the sketch of a man in the wanted poster so resembled him that he turn himself him to claim a $2 million reward in the bombing.
Another defense witness, Junction City waitress Nancy Kindle, testified that she saw McVeigh about 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 16, 1995. If she is correct, her testimony would contradict the government’s evidence that McVeigh at that time was well on his way to Oklahoma City to drop off his getaway car.
McVeigh, a 29-year-old former Army soldier, is on trial for his life in the Murrah building bombing, in which 168 people died; more than 500 were injured.
A second defendant, Terry L. Nichols, is to be tried later.
Both McVeigh and Nichols have pleaded not guilty.
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