April 19, 1995 at 9:02 a.m.

Gina Bonny was sitting at her desk in the Murrah building and working on a report. She had just returned from the Drug Enforcement Administration office at the other end of the building and from visiting with its administrative staff — a group of women affectionately known as “the girls.”

Bonny, then a Midwest City police officer assigned to a DEA task force and often partnered with my mom, said when her computer began acting out of order she had the sense something wasn’t right.

“And then I heard the explosion,” Bonny said. “After that, it’s like I was asleep, and I woke up on my knees and my arms were above my head and there was stuff all on top of me.”

Her first instinct was that it was the end of the world, Bonny said. Her training, however, told her differently — it was a bomb. She stood up, took in the destruction around her, and located two members of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms nearby, both alive but severely injured.

“One of them had something metal stuck down into his side, but it was stuck so I had to pull it out so he could get up. He was kind of bleeding, just a little bit everywhere,” Bonny said. “I get to [the other agent] and he had a pretty good-sized hole in his head and it was bleeding bad, so I’m trying to take his shirt off, so I can put the shirt in the hole to help stop the bleeding.”

Bonny helped them run down the nine flights of stairs to get out of the building. When she asked, someone on the ground told her they had not seen the “the girls.”

Meanwhile, McCarver remembers somehow running the four blocks back to her building. She never wore a dress to work, she said, but did that day because she was expected in the judge’s chamber for a case that afternoon.

Though her memory of those first few minutes remains fuzzy, McCarver said she made two calls. One to her office — nobody answered — and another to my dad, Paul McCarver, leaving a voicemail to let him know she was alive.

“He walked around to the answering machine, because he immediately has no idea where I’m at,” McCarver said with tears in her eyes. “And he sees one blinking light — and it’s my message.”

When she arrived on the scene, McCarver spotted an ATF agent with his head out the window on the ninth floor of the Murrah building. She asked him about her office and he just shook his head.

Then a DEA special agent and coworker of McCarver’s, Kevin Waters, had woken up late and been at home when the bomb detonated. He flashed his badge to pass the police tape and ran to the back of the building, where he was handed a phone to speak with the same ATF agent in the building. Waters simply asked in regard to his coworkers, “Did they suffer?”

In the chaos, Waters said he saw a police officer crying and carrying a baby. It was immediately clear the baby had been killed — he had never even known there was a daycare on the second floor of the building, Waters said. Nineteen of the people killed in the bombing were children, according to the FBI website. Fifteen of those killed had been dropped off at the America’s Kids daycare center that morning.

Bonny was still helping out on the ground when an attorney she knew approached her and asked if she was hurt. Covered in blood, Bonny answered that she didn’t know and let herself be steered toward an ambulance. On the way, she saw her husband.

“And of course he comes running up to me,” Bonny said. “He thought I was dead, so he was just so happy to see me. And I told him we need to go back in. The girls — we need to find the girls.”