Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995: Twenty minutes before the blast that leveled the Murrah Federal building in downtown Oklahoma City employees at a tire store spotted Timothy McVeigh and a short Middle Eastern-looking man in a Ryder truck and gave the pair directions.
Five minutes before the blast, printing operator Jerry Nance noticed an unusual car in the downtown Oklahoma City parking lot. It was a dilapidated yellow Mercury Marquis. Behind the wheel was a dark-skinned, Middle Eastern-looking man in a ball cap.
When Nance walked back towards the car to get some stuff from his own car, the Mercury Marquis almost ran him over. Now, however, the Middle Eastern man was sitting in the passenger seat, and a tall white man was driving the car out of the parking lot, recklessly at that.
Two minutes later, the Murrah building blew up. Nance informed the FBI of this incident and the car before anyone knew McVeigh had been apprehended in a yellow Mercury Marquis.
Another eyewitness, Daina Bradley, cried out to the rescuers who were trying to extricate her after the blast. "It was a Ryder truck. It pulled up, a foreign looking man got out, and then before long, everything went black."
A week later, the FBI quoted Nance and the tire store employees in its request before a federal judge to hold McVeigh over for trial. The Washington Post of April 28 confirmed the same:
The
magistrate, Ronald L. Howland, ordered McVeigh to be held without bail
after listening to four hours of testimony from FBI special agent John
Hersley in which he described eyewitness accounts of a yellow Mercury with McVeigh and another maninside speeding away from a parking lot near the federal building. (italics mine)
For
the next six weeks, John Doe #2 was the most hunted man in the world
until, without explanation, he just kind of went away. The narrative had
shifted. The White House only needed the two white right-wingers, Terry
Nichols and McVeigh. With them as poster children, the media buried
Gingrich's "Republican Revolution" in the rubble of the Murrah building.
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