NOT AGAIN!!! Families of the seven Norman residents killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Families of the seven Norman residents killed in the Oklahoma City bombing reflected on their losses, the community’s response and how they’ve healed 30 years later.
Caye Allen put her bagel in the office microwave just after 9 a.m. on April 19, 1995. It had been a hectic morning in the Allens’ house — getting six kids ready for the day was chaos, as it always was.
Caye and her husband, Ted Allen, drove together to work in Oklahoma City, as they often did. She dropped Ted off at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where he worked as an urban planner for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Ted kissed her goodbye and told her he loved her, as he always did.
At the U.S. attorney’s office in the Oklahoma Tower, Caye stood at the microwave as an explosion in the Murrah building, just a few blocks down the street, rocked downtown Oklahoma City.
From the fourth floor, Caye couldn’t tell what happened. Her coworkers thought the blast might have come from the nearby courthouse. She remembered thinking, “Man, do I have a story to tell when I get home.”
Caye and a friend walked down Harvey Avenue to the site of the blast. The ground was covered in glass, debris, paper — and the bagel Caye quickly cast aside.
It was eerily silent, she said, until alarms began to sound. They echoed off the high-rise downtown buildings, reverberating in her head. Police wouldn’t let onlookers see the back of the building, where the bomb had detonated, because it was too hot. Nearby cars were ablaze.
Around them, people sprang into action, helping the wounded away from the blast site.
“I thought, ‘OK, that would be (Ted’s) instinct.’ I knew in a heartbeat that’s what he’d be doing,” Caye said. “‘Or maybe he’s trapped in a stairway because he was on the eighth floor,’ and so I thought maybe he’s trapped in a stairway.
Caye spent the rest of the day in a holding area in the basement of a hospital and then in a church, waiting for news of Ted.
No news came.
“I thought, ‘OK, he’s hurt, but they’ll get to him,’” Caye said. “I told myself to stay sane, that everything was going to be OK.”
When she arrived home around 10:30 p.m., Caye finally saw the damage to the back of the Murrah building on the evening news.
“Once I saw that, I knew,” Caye said.
Ted’s office was in the rubble.
“I never said a word to the kids and never said a word to anybody because I wanted everybody to keep hope,” Caye said, her voice breaking. “You just never know. I wanted everybody to keep hope.”
Caye, however, had lost all hope. After a week, the Allen family was notified that Ted had died in the blast.
Caye knew 45 people who died that day.
‘He loved seeing them happy’
Caye and Ted met on their first day working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development a decade before the bombing when they were both married to other people. Every day, the two carpooled with three others from Norman to work in Oklahoma City. They both eventually left HUD and didn’t see each other for over five years.
Then Caye and Ted, both divorced, reconnected at a New Year’s Eve party and began dating soon after. The couple married in 1989 and joined their five children — Spencer, Jill, Gretchen, Meghan and Rachel — into one family. They had a son, Austin Allen, together in 1990.
