He asked to borrow Etta Mae Hartke's ladder so that he could fix a loose metal vent on the roof. When I looked, it was back where it was supposed to be. I thought it was peculiar. Within minutes, word spread through the town of 3,000 that a man who may have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing was in the hands of Herington's five-man police department. Farmers in mud-caked boots, some holding small children in their arms, planted themselves across from the police station and stared mutely.
Students just let out of school arrived and stood in clusters six deep.
Some climbed into the beds of pickup trucks to get a better view. Kill the creep. Such rage may only deepen in the days and weeks to come, as more is learned about these men and their involvement in the nation's worst terrorist action ever, a crime that last week had left an official toll of 65 adults and 13 children dead and at least 100 still missing in the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Although Nichols and his brother James are being held as material witnesses, their friend and associate McVeigh was charged, under Title 18 of U.S. Code, Section 844, with bombing a government building. Meanwhile, federal investigators are now focusing their attention on Kingman, Arizona, where McVeigh lived in a trailer park for five months last year with a pregnant girlfriend.