168 seconds of silence mark Oklahoma City bombing

In this story:

• Branch Davidians honor 'political prisoners'
• Survivors reach for 'a new normal'

OKLAHOMA CITY (CNN) -- The solemn gathering at the former site of the Oklahoma City federal building was largely silent Saturday as family and friends gathered to remember the people killed in the Afred P. Murrah Federal Building's bombing on April 19, 1995.

A Marine Corps color guard laid a wreath at the site and a member of the Oklahoma City Police Honor Guard played taps. Then, at 9:02 a.m., the gathering observed 168 seconds of silence, one for each of the people killed in the blast.

Just as members of the crowd bowed their heads, a fire truck's siren -- on an unrelated emergency call -- sounded somewhere in the distance, an eerie reminder of the morning when firefighters and police rushed to the smoking rubble scattered by the blast.

O K C     R E M E M B E R E D Q U I C K T I M E     S L I D E S H O W S
	April 19, 1995: A look back (2 minutes/1.4M)
	Reflections of the victims (1:50/1.3M)
	Lost love ones remembered, two years later (30 sec/630k)

The tolling of church bells in Oklahoma City and across the state ended the crowd's silent reflections. Bells tolled as well in Denver, where Timothy McVeigh will soon go on trial for the bombing.

McVeigh, 28, a former Army soldier, is accused of parking a rental truck packed with explosives in front of the government building in retaliation for the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Saturday also marks the fourth anniversary of the Waco compound's fiery end, and Branch Davidians gathered at the site for a ceremony in honor of what it calls political prisoners.

In Oklahoma, Gov. Frank Keating said that two years after the bombing, local residents are still having a hard time dealing with the aftermath.

"Some people don't want to remember it," he said. "Some people are very resentful, very angry. Some people break into tears when they think of these old film footages, two years old, that are now being re-shown. (145K/13 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

"So I think there are at least 168 different emotions, maybe three times that."

Paul Heath, president of the Oklahoma City Building Survivors Association, stands firmly among those who believe the day must be remembered. "It does help us to process this," he said. Hopefully, he said, bombing victims will find closure with a memorial underway now.

By closure, he said, "We call it reaching a new normal," in which he and others seek to find new hope in the goodness of their community, to make sense out of the bombing. (272K/25 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

Like Heath, Jannie Coverdale attended the memorial Saturday morning. She said she did not expect she would ever get over losing her two grandsons to the blast. (128K/12 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

Billy Cleveland, whose 36-year-old daughter died in the bombing, planned to visit a fence marking the blast site Saturday. "It never gets any better," Cleveland said.

A jury is still being chosen for McVeigh's trial, which his attorneys had moved from Oklahoma City to Denver on grounds that he couldn't receive a fair trial in the city of the bombing.

According to a new CNN/TIME Magazine poll released Saturday, most Americans believe McVeigh is probably guilty of setting the 1995 blast, and 75 percent favor the death penalty if he is found guilty.

However, only a quarter of those polled thought he was definitely guilty, indicating that reasonable doubt may exist in the minds of many Americans. And only 9 percent believe that the authorities have caught everybody responsible for the bombing.

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