AP Was There: A truck bomb rips through a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995

OKLAHOMA CITY — EDITORS NOTE: On April 19, 1995, a former U.S. Army soldier parked a rented Ryder truck loaded with a powerful bomb made of fertilizer and fuel oil outside a federal office building in Oklahoma City. The blast at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured more than 500 others in what remains the deadliest homegrown attack on American soil.

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It was 9:02 a.m. in the Oklahoma City bureau of The Associated Press when a handful of staffers, some just getting to work, were startled by what felt like a small quake rattling the office.

Some guessed it was a nearby gas explosion. Then reports started trickling in.

“It didn’t take long at all for the gravity of the event to set in,” said Linda Franklin, the AP's Oklahoma City news editor at the time.

She quickly dispatched reporters and photographers to the downtown Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building about 6 miles (10 kilometers) away. They would become among the first journalists on the scene of the deadliest homegrown attack in U.S. history: an explosion that killed 168 people, including 19 children, and left more than 500 others injured.

Judy Gibbs Robinson, then a broadcast editor for the AP whose job was mostly filing brief stories for radio and TV, was the first AP reporter to arrive downtown.

“I still remember the dress shoes I was wearing, because they had fabric on the sides and I was stepping over glass,” Gibbs Robinson said. "A lot of people were just pointing and saying: ‘It’s downtown. It’s downtown.’”

In some ways, Gibbs Robinson was prepared for the moment. A broadcast training she had recently attended urged reporters to record all the sights and sounds of a news event. As she made her way closer to the building, the AP veteran put those skills to work.

“I just started talking and watching and listening, describing what I was seeing," she said.

Thirty years later, what Gibbs Robinson witnessed is still seared into her memory. Parents reuniting with their children at a YMCA daycare near the blast site. A man whose suit looked untouched from the front but was shredded in the back because his back was turned to a window when the blast erupted.

Cellphones were not yet commonplace, but Gibbs Robinson needed to call the newsroom. She entered a bank, where employees had stretched a landline telephone out onto a ledge, making it available to anyone. Meanwhile, emergency responders streamed into the area.

"That was how I filed my first report,” she said.

Back in the newsroom, Franklin and other staffers pushed a steady stream of copy and photos onto the AP wire for newspapers and broadcasters around the world. The phones rang constantly, with other media outlets inquiring about AP copy or asking for the names of people killed or wounded.

“I remember feeling like an octopus that day. I just didn’t have enough arms,” said Lindel Hutson, the bureau chief in Oklahoma City.

The newsroom was moving in a blur and, amidst it all, a stranger walked through the door. Hutson recalled almost being too busy to talk to the man, who said he was an amateur photographer and wanted to show the AP pictures he had snapped at the blast site.

Hutson and David Longstreath, an AP staff photographer, took a moment to see what he had. One image jumped out immediately. It showed an Oklahoma City firefighter cradling a fatally wounded baby in his arms.

“I thought, 'Oh my God.’ This is it,” Hutson recalled.

On the spot, Hutson negotiated a deal with the photographer, Charles Porter, to purchase the image. The photo won Porter the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography and remains one of the most defining images of the attack.

“I think that picture probably said more than 1,000 words could about what happened down there," Hutson said.

By the end of the night, the Oklahoma City bureau had become a cramped hotbed of activity. AP reporters, editors and photographers from across the country had descended on the small office for the story that would consume the staff in the months ahead.

For everyone who had a role in the coverage, it was among the most significant event in their professional lives.

“This happened in our backyard,” Hutson said. “It took quite a mental toll on everyone.”

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Following is the story the AP published on the day of the bombing, Wednesday, April 19, 1995, before the true death toll was known.