I had the honor of meeting and talking with Joe Hartzler this week. If you don’t know him, you will at the end of this blog.
On April 19, 1995, United States Attorney Pete Strom assembled the Greenville federal prosecutors in a room to discuss a new violent crime initiative. He received an emergency call, left the meeting, and returned a minute later with these words: “something has happened in Oklahoma City.” That “something” was an act of domestic terrorism and barbarism. Nineteen of the victims were children, fifteen of whom were in the America’s Kids Day Care Center. Timothy McVeigh was arrested an hour after the bombing about an hour outside Oklahoma City headed north. On the front of his shirt were the words “sic semper tyrannis” – the same words John Wilkes Booth uttered when he killed President Abraham Lincoln.
Federal prosecutor Joe Hartzler was given the awesome responsibility of prosecuting McVeigh. Joe worked in Illinois but the case was prosecuted initially in Oklahoma and ultimately in Denver, Colorado. Joe spent two years of his life building an impregnable case against McVeigh which resulted in guilty verdicts, death sentences, and the ultimate execution of McVeigh.
Joe started the most anticipated opening statement in what was truly the trial of the century by describing the morning of April 19, 1995, through the eyes of the children who were killed. He called their names, described their mornings and all the ones he described died shortly after 9:00 am on April 19th. And then, Joe played an audiotape from a hearing being conducted in a building near the federal building McVeigh bombed. This was a hearing about a fairly mundane water dispute where two citizens were challenging a government decision. He played the tape in part because you heard the bomb blast on the audiotape and could hear the screaming afterwards. He also played the tape because it proved his point: Americans handle their disagreements with government with due process, civility, and without killing innocent children.
Joe, thank you for your service to our country in prosecuting a man who killed 168 fellow Americans, injured 680 others, and committed a crime against everything this country stands for.
