Survival Story
It was a day the world turned topsy turvy for all Americans, but trapped inside the federal building wreckage, Sheara Tucker was living the nightmare
Twenty-five years later, Sheara Tucker remembers the darkness.
When she regained consciousness on the morning of April 19, 1995, trapped in the debris that had been the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Tucker did not understand why she could not see. She has been looking for the light ever since.
Born and raised in Texarkana, Tucker — then Sheara Gamble — was a 1986 graduate of Arkansas High School who went on to earn a degree at University of Arkansas Pine Bluff. When she graduated in May 1990, she was excited about a promising employment prospect with the Social Security Administration in Dallas. She got the job as a claims specialist, but she was needed more in Oklahoma City. She was 21 years old.
“I was kind of a shy person, so I think some of my family was surprised that I took a job in Oklahoma, away from family, because it was a close-knit family,” Tucker said in an exclusive interview Friday.
Luckily, a friend was by her side. Derwin Miller, a UAPB classmate, was hired at the same time, and the two went to work in catercorner cubicles on the Murrah Building’s first floor.
“We had become close, good friends. He was like my big brother, friend, bodyguard,” Tucker said. “They referred to us as ‘the kids.’”
The Day
Five years later, the day that would see the most deadly act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history began almost normally for Tucker. It was a Wednesday, and it was her first day back to work after visiting family in Texarkana over the Easter weekend. Her biggest concern was
making a good first impression on the new district manager.
“I don’t remember what time I got to work that day. We could go in as early as 7, but I’m pretty sure I was not there at 7 o’clock,” she said.
She chatted with Miller for a few minutes and then began working at her desk. For reasons she cannot explain, instead of retrieving them as usual, she let documents stack up in the department’s shared printer near the building’s front window.
“If I had gone to the printer, I probably would have seen the truck. If I had gone to the printer, I probably would have died,” she said.
At 9:02 a.m., the world changed.
“I felt a streak of pain go through my arm, and before I could even look at my arm or figure out why, what happened, what is this, the explosion apparently happened, and the next thing I know I’m waking up in darkness, buried. …
“It was almost like someone had sat me down. … I woke up, and I realized I was sitting, and I could not figure out where I was because it was dark. And what I’m going to say next doesn’t make sense, because it was jet black dark, not a streak of light. But for some reason, I thought I was under my desk. I thought I fell out of my chair,” Tucker said.
Over the next five to six hours, her confusion would remain, but she soon understood one fact with certainty: She was trapped.
“When I went to get up, I realized I couldn’t. There was no room around me to do anything. I could not sit up completely, because when I woke up I was leaning over, so I try to sit up, and I can’t sit up completely. There’s something blocking my head. I’m reaching, and my arm span is really limited, elbows bent, because everything is right there around me. It’s like I was just in a pocket,” she said.
At 4 feet, 8-and-a-half inches tall, Tucker now thinks her size was key to her survival.
“My height, I know, saved my life. I could have been decapitated. I could have lost limbs. But everything fell around me. It was tight, but it didn’t hurt me,” she said.
One foot was stuck in debris, but she soon pulled it free. Later she would learn that she had suffered a cut on her right thigh, along with multiple nicks from flying shattered glass. But she felt no pain, a fact she now attributes to being in shock.
What followed is often hazy in Tucker’s memory because she drifted in and out of consciousness. She heard muffled cries from others around her, but there were fewer and fewer as time passed.
“You could make out more what they were saying, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ The more I learned as the years passed, I think it was because people began to start getting out,” she said.
The worst was yet to come.
Another Threat “Eventually, I’m feeling water. Water started coming in. They told me it was from the pipes in the building. …
“It was rising, and I just knew I was going to drown. I knew I was going to drown. And when it got to my chest — again, I’m seated, kind of leaning over because I can’t sit up — it gets to my chest, and I actually accepted that that was my fate.
“I had accepted it, and I just began speaking to the Lord and praying that he took care of my daddy, because my daddy was a stroke patient, and I knew this would kill him. …
“And once I finished my prayer, I started trying to decide how I was going to do this. Are you going to do this quickly and just take the water in? Because I knew I couldn’t hold my breath long. I don’t know how to swim. You start thinking, do you try to keep your nose up as long as you can and maybe you get that miraculous rescue?
“But it didn’t get to that point. All of a sudden, while I’m still waiting on the water to continue rising, it stopped, and it started slowly going down. And I found out later that they realized the water was running in the pipes, and they turned the water off,” she said.
When she was conscious, she called for help.
“When I do hear what I think is someone getting closer to me, I stop screaming, trying to listen. And once I realized what happened, I heard them walking away, and I could not believe they’re leaving me,” Tucker said.
She knew she had to do something different.
“I turned my rings around on my hand, and I started banging my rings. Of course, once I get rescued and get to the hospital, they cut my rings off, and I can see the stones are smashed. I don’t know if that’s from me banging or if that happened during the explosion.
“And that wasn’t working. Something finally says, ‘You tried to distinguish your yell by tapping your rings. Now you need to distinguish that noise.’ So I started tapping SOS in Morse code. I’ve never been a Girl Scout. That’s the only thing I know in Morse code. It was God. I know it was God,” she said. “Eventually, I did find out from the firemen, that is what made them distinguish the noise.”
Rescuers began yelling to her and removing debris, careful not to cause a collapse.
“When I saw some light, it was not in front of me. It was not where I would have focused my attention. It was down to the right. So I thought I was on the floor, but I was not on the bottom floor,” she said.
Tucker will never forget the name of the fireman who saved her: Bobby Lax.
“He said, ‘We don’t think we can move anything else. Do you think you can get out through here?’ … I was already leaning over, so I kind
of just maneuvered my body and wiggled over down to that little opening they made. And I kind of rolled over on my back. I was able to roll over once I leaned that way, and they were able to pull me out,” she said.
She still had no understanding of what had happened, but it was then that her body finally reacted to hours in 40-degree water.
“I was freezing at that point, pain where my leg was cut. I felt nothing while I was trapped, but once they got me out, I was freezing, and it took hours for me to stop quivering and for my teeth to stop chattering,” she said.
Aftermath
In Texarkana, Tucker’s parents, Maurice and Israel Gamble, had seen the news. Her uncle Walton Gamble drove them as fast as he could to Oklahoma City. The only thing they could think to do was to go to Tucker’s apartment.
By then, Tucker had telephoned her boyfriend, who contacted her neighbor, who put a note on her door explaining she was in the hospital. She never doubted her parents would be there for her.
“It’s about time,” she said when they came into her hospital room.
“Later, they told me how I looked. I had no idea how I looked. My bed, for some reason, it was stuck raised up. So when they came in the room, I looked like a wild woman because my hair had