Right before he committed suicide, he said, “They are not telling the truth about what is going on down there.”
One year after the Oklahoma City bombings, the officer who saved eight lives was found dead under strange circumstances. On Wednesday, April 19, 1995, Sergeant Terrence Yeakey responded to calls that a bomb had gone off in the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.
At the time, I was en route to pick up passengers at a rehabilitation facility in Reno. Later, I called my dad to see if he was okay because he said his office was across from the Murrah Building, learning he was nowhere in the area.
Yakey was the first officer to respond that day and was able to save eight people before the second floor collapsed, injuring his back so severely after falling through the floors he was not able to continue. An hour and a half later, police arrested Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were anti-government extremists.
A year after the bombing, Oklahoma City officials selected Yakey and 90 other officers to receive the city’s Medal of Valor. However, three days before the ceremony, on Wednesday, May 8, 1996, he was found dead in a field near his hometown of El Reno, Okla.
Investigators found his car abandoned along the side of a dirt road, with a lot of blood inside, but his body was found about a mile into the field off of that road. While they did not find a gun at the scene, he had been shot in the head and covered in cuts.
According to one report, “While still inside his Ford Probe that he had parked on a lonely country road, Yakey slashed himself 11 times on both forearms, twice on his throat, then apparently seeking an even more private place to end his life, he crawled 8,000 feet through rough terrain and climbed a fence before putting a gun to his head, which took him to the hereafter.”
He did not leave a note, and there was no investigation or autopsy, but police still ruled that he had taken his own life. Not in the report are the facts that investigators said he showed signs of being bound at one point, had rope burns on his neck, ligature marks on his wrists, and that an FBI agent showed up and suspiciously found a gun in an already thoroughly searched area within five minutes of being there.
Terry had an ex-wife named Tania, who was the mother of his children, McKenna, 4, and Sheridan, 2, and claimed that when she picked him up from the hospital after the bombing, he started crying and said, “It is not what they are saying it is. They are not telling the truth about what is going on down there,” but would not elaborate any further.
She claimed that two or three days after the bombing, he asked her to take him back to the site so he could check for something under the daycare center, but turned away from the area. She claimed that his supervisor made him rewrite his report on the bombing and that he started showing up at her house at strange hours and acting very anxious and afraid.
She said he started gathering up all of their insurance paperwork for her to keep and that he wanted them to get remarried so that their daughters would be protected if something happened to him, and that he knew something was coming fast and was trying to protect his family, but he was not fast enough. After he passed, she went bankrupt and lost their house, and she said she knew for sure if he had planned to take his life, he would have made sure they were cared for first.
His daughters did not receive a cent of his pension. Tonya said that the police department was much more concerned with promoting a narrative that he took his own life because he felt guilty for not being able to save more people during the bombing and being estranged from his wife and children, which was simply not true.
The reality is that there was a high-level federal operation called PATCON, which infiltrated the “patriot movement” across the U.S. during the Clinton administration, with informants and provocateurs likely connected to the OKC bombing. His killing was to cover up federal assets, like informants, provocateurs, and infiltrators, who were involved in the bombing plot, shielding the federal government from potential blowback.
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