Children of the bombing: Forever transformed by death and destruction in Oklahoma City

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OKLAHOMA CITY — Close your eyes as PJ Allen talks and you’d struggle to guess how old he is.

A teenager? A twentysomething?

Older? Younger?

His voice is soft and almost childlike, and while the raspiness and the effort it takes him every time he breathes hint at something out of the ordinary, the voice itself is a time capsule. A through line to the worst day in Oklahoma's history. A reminder of how far we’ve come.

It is a voice of survival.

“My voice is not gonna change,” said PJ, now 31. “How I sound is always how I’ve sounded since then.”

PJ is the youngest survivor of the Oklahoma City bombing. Only 18 months old on the April morning a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, he was one of only six children at the America’s Kids day care inside the building who lived through the blast.

Nineteen children were killed by the explosion, including 15 in the day care.

Many more children were affected by the bombing, too. Thirty children were orphaned while another 219 lost at least one parent.

The children whose lives were changed forever by the bombing were different ages with various backgrounds. All of them, however, were still growing – and that growth was altered in so many ways.

Now on the 30th anniversary of the bombing, the children have become symbols. Much like the Survivor Tree, they are reminders that some injuries never fully heal and many scars never entirely fade. 

But like Oklahoma City and the state, growth has happened, imperfect but powerful.

Just like PJ Allen’s voice.

In addition to other injuries, his lungs and vocal cords were severely damaged by the heat and the smoke from the bombing. One of his lungs collapsed, reducing his breathing capacity and forcing him to do multiple breathing treatments every day. And the damage to his vocal cords seemed to freeze his voice in time.

Every time he speaks, he is reminded of what happened.

But he’s reminded, too, of what he survived.

“Nothing’s really gonna go away,” he said, “but it’s OK because I appreciate being here today.”

***

Yesterday, Hillary and I had the privilege of speaking with some children of other federal employees – children like those who were lost here – and one little girl said something we will never forget. She said, “We should all plant a tree in memory of the children.” So this morning before we got on the plane to come here, at the White House, we planted that tree in honor of the children of Oklahoma. It was a dogwood with its wonderful spring flower and its deep, enduring roots. It embodies the lesson of the Psalms – that the life of a good person is like a tree whose leaf does not wither.

My fellow Americans, a tree takes a long time to grow, and wounds take a long time to heal. But we must begin. 

— An excerpt from President Bill Clinton’s speech during the Bombing Memorial Prayer Service, April 23, 1995.

***

Clint Seidl wanted to know why he never got anything in the mail.

As a kid growing up in the early 1990s, he watched his parents, Kathy and Glenn, get all sorts of interesting stuff. Letters. Magazines. Cards. Bills. But nothing ever had his name on it.

It made the 5-year-old mad.

“So every week, my mom would send me a card from her office to home,” Clint said. “Once a week, I had some mail.”

For the next couple of years, Kathy would send something to their Bethel Acres home from the U.S. Secret Service office where she worked as an investigative assistant in the Murrah Building. 

She was killed in the bombing.

“And you know,” Clint said, “the mail stopped.”

Clint was 7 the day his world changed. He remembers one of the lunch ladies coming into his second grade classroom to tell his teacher that something bad had happened in downtown Oklahoma City. Clint remembers the lunch lady didn’t use words like bomb or explosion or terrorist. Probably didn’t want to scare the kids.

But the way she looked gave it away – the situation was bad.

Clint’s family eventually congregated at his aunt’s house in Midwest City. 

“A lot of confusion,” he said. “In the confusion and the chaos of the whole event, I don’t know that anybody ever really sat me down and explained the situation.”

He paused.

“Lord A'mighty, how do you do that?”

Now 37, Clint has four kids of his own. Three are already older than he was the day his mom died, and still, he isn’t sure how he’d handle such news with them. 

How do you make sense of the senseless?

Three long days passed before Clint’s family got word that his mom’s body had been found. 

He remembers noticing how others around him reacted. His mom’s parents leaned heavily on their faith to provide understanding that they didn’t have.

While Clint had always gone to church, his parents had always been more "faith without works is dead" folks. Get up. Get to work. Get your hands dirty.

That was especially true of his dad.

“Hardest working man I’ve ever met in my life,” said Clint, who himself owns and runs a plumbing and construction company in Shawnee while also working as a firefighter.

In more recent years, Glenn moved to Lake Eufaula. Before a bout with cancer slowed him down a bit, he would make the 90-minute drive to Shawnee every morning to work with Clint, drive back home late in the afternoon and then immediately start mowing or doing repairs or helping neighbors.

But in the days after Kathy died, Glenn not only returned to his work as a plumber but also got heavily involved with lobbying Congress for a swifter death penalty in federal cases. He was part of a group that went to Washington, D.C., at least half a dozen times.

Clint always went along.

And when the trials for attackers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were held, Glenn and Clint were there. Clint was even set to give one of the victim-impact statements during the penalty phase of the McVeigh trial.

He was only 9.

Ultimately, the judge ruled that jurors had heard enough without listening to a child’s heartbreak. Glenn, instead, read the words Clint had wanted to say.

I miss my mom. We used to go for walks. She would read to me. We would go to Wal-Mart.

Sometimes at school, maybe a kid will bring something up, something that he got, and someone would ask him or her where they got it. And they usually said, “My mom got it,” and that makes me sad.

After the bomb, everyone went to my aunt’s house, and my grandma took me to the zoo, my cousin and I. While we were at the zoo, I bought my mom a ring.

I bought it for whenever they found her.

Clint followed in his dad’s footsteps, both in deed and demeanor. 

His dad was a stiff-upper-lip kind of guy, and Clint became known as the stoic kid with the sleepy brown eyes. He didn’t crack when he was testifying in front of Congress or listening to testimony in the McVeigh trial.

Because of his ease with crowds, some of the other folks who also lobbied in Washington wondered if Clint might help with a fundraiser. It would ask schoolchildren across the country to donate 168 pennies, one for every victim of the bombing, to help build the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum.

Pennies for My Mom, it was called.

Clint jumped in with both feet, partnering with fellow Oklahoman and former Miss America Shawntel Smith, going to schools all over Oklahoma and beyond to encourage kids to get involved.

After one presentation, a student approached Clint and said that he, too, had lost his mother. She had given him a 50-cent piece before she died.

“We were in just extreme poverty,” the student told Clint, “so this is all she had to give me.”

He had carried the coin and fiddled with it for so long that it was almost worn smooth.

He gave Clint the coin.

“I still have it,” Clint said.

Before the museum opened a few years later, Clint and his family were invited to a special preview event; Pennies for My Mom had raised $500,000. What he saw and heard that day, he can’t remember, but what he felt lingers still.

“Something in that museum reached up and bit me,” he said. “My grandmother had to walk me out. That might have been the first time I really, really lost my cool.”

Was it anger?

Was it sadness?

“I think just a kid who’d been holding on to too much for too long,” he said.

He paused.

“I didn’t go back for a long, long, long time.”

Even after taking his grandparents to the remembrance ceremony on the 20th anniversary, he kept his distance from that space. From that day, too. He swept the bombing under the rug and tried to forget as much as he could.

And in some ways, he succeeded; when he’d get texts from friends on April 19 telling him that they were thinking about him, he’d wonder what in the world they were talking about.

But he could never really get away from what happened. It was part of him.

About two years ago, Clint found himself in a funk, “a little bit of a hole,” he called it. He began seeing a therapist, and as he considered his life’s journey, he realized something.

“You know,” he thought, “I’ve got a pretty good story to tell.”

He called Kari Watkins, memorial CEO and president.

“I’ve sat idle long enough,” he told her. “Is there anything I could do?”

While few would say Clint has been idle, he has since spoken at several events done in conjunction with the memorial. He hopes to continue to share.

Continue to relish his life, too.

Sometimes, he’ll be watching his kids riding bulls or playing softball, and he’ll think how much his mom would’ve loved to be there watching her grandkids. How loud she would have cheered. How proud she would have been.

“It’s not always necessarily the big things … that throw you,” he said. “It’s those little things that kind of get you.”

***

A year ago, I noted that the dogwood tree embodies the lesson of the Psalms that the life of a good person is like a tree whose leaf does not wither; that just as a tree takes a long time to grow, sometimes wounds take a long time to heal. Well, your tree has taken root on the South Lawn of the White House. In a few weeks it will flower. The healing power of our faith has also taken root and must bloom again here.

— An excerpt from Clinton’s speech during the one-year commemoration ceremony, April 5, 1996.

***

The photo of Krista Doll’s mom sat in the middle of her grandparents’ mantel for years. In front of that fireplace, after all, was the spot where everyone gathered to take pictures at the holidays and on special occasions.

“So then my mom was in every picture that we took,” Krista said.

Her mom, Jamie Genzer, was killed in the bombing.

Krista was 11.

Over the 30 years since, Krista has done everything possible to make her mom part of her life. That starts with sharing memories and telling stories about Jamie, who was a loan officer at the Federal Employees Credit Union on the third floor of the Murrah Building.  

Talking about her is not something Krista and her older brother, Kyle, did all that much in the years after she died. They moved in with their dad and stepmom, and while Krista and Kyle had visited them every other weekend, they had lived with Jamie for a decade.

As loving and kind and wonderful as their dad and stepmom were, they weren’t grieving like Krista and Kyle.

“Through therapy, I learned we were grieving in a nongrieving household,” Krista said. “Nothing against my parents. It’s just they weren’t grieving.”

The grief that Krista felt colored everything. When she reached any big moment – first day of high school, 16th birthday, prom, graduation – there was not only excitement and anticipation but also sadness and heartache.

“For every milestone, she’s not here,” Krista said, “and from 11, that’s a lot of milestones.”

But as Krista went into teaching and then became a school counselor trained as a trauma therapist – she now works at a middle school in Norman, Oklahoma – she was able to align her personal experience with professional teachings.

That old adage that time heals all wounds?

Bunk.

Grief never totally dissipates.

“It just shifts and evolves,” Krista said. “Because as your life changes, so does your grief. It gets easier. I don’t cry every day, and I’m not sad about it all the time. 

“But there are days where it’s just like, ‘This really sucks.’ … There’s always a reminder: ‘They’re not here. It’s just one more thing they’ve missed.’”

Krista always welcomes discussions with her children about her mom. Whether from her two teenage sons or her twin daughters, she never turns down the chance to talk about the grandma they never got to meet.

If they have questions or want to hear stories, nothing is off-limits.

“If it makes me cry, it makes me cry, but we’ll still talk about her,” Krista said.

Sometimes when one of the kids brings up Jamie out of the blue, Krista will wonder where it came from. Why were they even thinking of Jamie?

Then Krista will smile and silently say hello to her mom.

“Yeah, we’re thinking of you.”

Krista brings along her mom figuratively all the time, but she regularly brings along her picture, too.

Over the years, she would go to her grandparents’ house and borrow that Glamour Shots photo of her mom, complete with big hair and shiny jacket, anytime she wanted to include it in special photos.

“I need Mama,” she’d tell her granddad.

“Wrap her up and take good care of her,” he’d say. “Bring her back in one piece.”

She hates that her mom missed so many things, but what Krista would hate more is if she didn't do so many of the things her mom would have relished. If she had allowed grief to derail her. 

She could’ve become another victim.

Instead, she is a survivor.

“Our past doesn’t define us. Our story doesn’t define us,” she said. “We’re evolving.

“We choose.”

***

As I left the White House today, I looked as I often do at your tree, the beautiful dogwood Hillary and I planted on the South Lawn five years ago for those who were lost here. Five years later that tree stands a little taller. Its spring flowers are a little fuller. Its roots have dug in a little deeper. But it is still a young tree. Five years isn't a very long time for trees to grow or for wounds to heal and hearts to mend. But today, like your beautiful dogwood tree on the White House lawn, Oklahoma City clearly is blooming again.

— An excerpt from Clinton’s speech at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum dedication, April 19, 2000.

***

Mention the hamburger chain Red Robin, and Dina Abulon thinks not of juicy burgers and bottomless fries.

She thinks of algebra.

While the family was at Red Robin one evening, her stepdad, Peter Avillanoza, began talking about algebra. Even though Dina was only in elementary school at the time, Peter pulled out a pen and started scribbling numbers and equations on a napkin.

But he didn’t just share variables and coefficients.

“Be the best that you can,” Dina remembers him saying. “Do the best that you can. You’re going to be something great. You’re going to be something fantastic.”

Thirty years later, she credits him for shaping her professional life.

She just wishes he were still here to see what he inspired.

Peter Avillanoza died in the bombing.

Dina was 14.

She and her mom, Darlene, had only just moved from California to Oklahoma City, where Peter had been transferred by the Department of Housing & Urban Development in early March 1995. He took over as the director of the Office of Fair Housing & Equal Opportunity.

Even though it was just the three of them in Oklahoma City, the marriage of Peter and Darlene had created a huge extended family. Nine kids. Fourteen grandkids.

In truth, their family even went beyond that. Peter and Darlene were both born in Hawaii, meeting when he was playing music and she was dancing hula.

“You know that Hawaii ‘aloha’ spirit?” Dina said. “Everybody’s essentially family.”

Dina had lots of support because of that while she was growing up, but Peter’s was the voice in her head as she started thinking about degrees she might want to pursue or careers she might want to consider.

“You should be a lawyer,” her mom would say.

“I want to be a doctor,” Dina would reply.

“Lawyer. Doctor. You can do whatever you want,” Peter would say. “In my mind, the options are open, but shoot as high as you can shoot.”

After Peter was killed, Dina and her mom eventually moved back to California. There was family. There was familiarity. But not being in Oklahoma, Dina didn’t have a lot of other people around her who were going through what she was.

“I think that made my recovery a little bit harder,” she said.

She paused.

“Not harder,” she clarified. “But it was always in the back, and I’m pretty sure I had PTSD because I would wake up crying every night without even thinking about it for a good, at least, 15 years.”

She lived with that pain and sorrow even as she graduated from high school and went off to UC Santa Barbara. She planned to major in biology and then go to medical school.

Halfway through, she had a change of heart, one spurred by things her stepdad had told her.

“I think I can do harder,” she thought. “I’m going to switch to mechanical engineering. I could always come back to biology.”

She got her bachelor’s in 2004.

Two years later, she got her master’s in mechanical engineering design from San Diego State. She decided to work for a few years and then go back to school on the biology/medical track.

But a few years working for a company that develops eye care devices hooked her. She wanted to stay in that world, combining engineering and medical care.

Still, another degree couldn’t hurt.

In late 2023, Dina got her doctorate in robotics.

“Every time,” she said, “it’s like the next one tops the next one and keeps shooting for the highest one.”

Now a medical director and clinical lead for drugmaker Iveric Bio, Dina knows Peter’s encouragement and Red Robin algebra lessons are part of her success. But she believes the bombing and its aftermath had a hand, too.

“I honestly think that overcoming what we did in Oklahoma, it was the grit,” she said. “It was like, ‘There’s nothing that’s going to be harder than emotionally overcoming that.’

“When I was in school, that’s why I kept signing myself up for something harder. … ‘I’m great in biology, but I’m going to try engineering because I think it’s going to be really hard.’”

She was right – it was excruciatingly hard.

“But nothing ever felt as tough as the emotional part of Oklahoma,” she said. “That’s what drove me to keep pushing so hard and see how hard, how bad is the struggle for this other big hurdle. 

“I think you kind of get addicted to looking back and thinking, ‘I survived.’”

***

I think of Oklahoma City sometimes as a tale of two trees – that one (pointing to The Survivor Tree), who proved that you’re tough and strong and endure, and a dogwood Hillary and I planted on the South Lawn of the White House. … For 20 years, you have honored the memories of your loved ones. You have inspired us with the power of your renewal.

— An excerpt from Clinton’s speech during the 20-year commemoration ceremony, April 19, 2015.

***

Courtney Randolph was a first-time mom with a 7-month-old and a second-shift job in a hospital lab.

Routine was something for another time.

Except for one thing. Every time she had a work shift, she would head to her parents’ house a few blocks away. Her dad would insist that she did.

“Bring the baby,” he’d say. “I’ll watch the baby while you shower and get ready for work.”

Now a mother of five, she chuckles at the whole thing.

“I didn’t think I could get ready with the baby,” she said.

But she is grateful for those new-mom jitters. She cherishes that regular and extended time she got to spend around her dad in early 1995.

Dick Cummins was killed in the bombing.

Courtney was 24 and was planning to head over to let him watch the baby when she felt a rumbling in her Mustang neighborhood, about 20 miles away from downtown. It was so pronounced that she thought something had happened on her street. A car accident, maybe. Perhaps a truck losing its load.

But a while later, she turned on the TV and saw there’d been an explosion in downtown Oklahoma City. It was thought to have been at the courthouse.

Courtney called her dad.

“Can you believe we felt that here?” she planned to tell him.

But he didn’t answer.

Dick worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and even though he had an office in the Murrah Building, he worked out of his house as a criminal investigator. Lots of days, he did paperwork or made calls in the morning before heading out on assignment; that’s why he was often around to help Courtney and hang out with the baby.

But on April 20, 1995, Dick and his wife, Frances, were leaving on vacation, so the day before, he went to the office to tie up a few loose ends.

“We had no idea he was even there,” Courtney said.

His body was recovered almost two weeks after the bombing.

Courtney struggled in the weeks and months after. Because her two siblings and their families lived elsewhere in the state and she was only a few blocks away, she spent a lot of time helping her mom.

And, of course, she still had a baby to take care of, too.

But taking care of herself?

“I did not do a good job,” she said.

“I really did focus on helping my mom through, and at the time, I didn’t take the time to get the help I needed. My focus was really just on her and helping her get through it.”

Courtney didn’t seek therapy until years later.

“I do regret that,” she said. “Just not taking the time for yourself.”

Eventually, one way she found that time for herself was through running. She started so she could participate in the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, something she’s done almost every year in some capacity. Some years, it’s been the relay. Others, she’s done the half or full marathon.

Last year, two of her kids ran, too, and this year, all three of her older boys and their wives are running the half. 

Her mama’s heart dreams of a day all five of her kids will do the race.

It’s the kind of thing her dad would’ve loved.

When she was growing up, she played basketball at Mustang High School and then went on to play college ball at Oklahoma Christian. Her parents were at pretty much every game, whether just across town or in the far corners of the state.

“He just was super supportive throughout that,” Courtney said of her dad.

His disposition was one of the reasons he always had her bring the baby over and get ready for work at his house.

“He was a such a caretaker,” she said. “The way that he showed love was to just make sure that you were so well taken care of.”

***

... All those who died had real lives, stories, families and friends. Nineteen of the victims were small children. ... Twenty-five years ago, the people of Oklahoma City made a decision that their future would not be defined by what was done to them, but by what they would do to move forward together. That choice has not made their pain any less real. But by shouldering their losses as one, with all of America standing behind them, they have emerged stronger.

— Excerpts from Clinton’s 2020 editorial in The Oklahoman commemorating the 25-year anniversary of the bombing.

***

PJ Allen will occasionally go back and watch interviews he’s done over the years. Maybe one from around his high school graduation. Or perhaps when there’s an anniversary of the bombing.

“Sometimes I forget how loud I breathe,” he said.

He smiled, then laughed.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, I thought I was pretty quiet, but you were still pretty loud.’ It’s OK, though. … Everything happened when I was so young that it’s just normal for me.”

Many things that were normal for PJ are anything but.

When the bomb went off outside the Murrah Building, there was hardly a part of PJ’s body that wasn’t injured. Bits of cinder block embedded in the back of his head. Smoke damaged his trachea, vocal cords and lungs. Fire scorched more than half of his body.

He was in the hospital for more than two months.

But there were many more hospital stays over the next few years. And even when he wasn’t in the hospital, his injuries affected almost every aspect of his life. 

He had a tracheostomy tube in his throat – it remained there until he was almost 12 – and he had to do breathing treatments several times a day. A nebulizer with a combination of saline and albuterol solutions helped to stabilize his lungs and maximize their capabilities.

Additionally, the burns on his skin were so severe that being in the sun was painful.

“I would just wait until the sun went down, then I would get to go outside and play,” PJ said. “Luckily, the neighborhood had other kids that would be playing around the same time.”

His grandmother and guardian, Deloris Watson, once said they slept much of the day and then became children of the night because of PJ's injuries.

But as his body healed, his world slowly opened. 

After being homeschooled through third grade – Oklahoma City Public Schools sent several teachers to his house every day to tutor and help – PJ's skin had healed enough for him to be able to attend school in fourth grade. He was excited about going to school, sure, but he was absolutely pumped to spend every day around other kids.

“I didn’t pay enough attention in class because I was trying to play with everybody,” he said, smiling.

PJ was like any little kid in so many ways. When he got his trach tube out, for example, he couldn’t wait to learn to swim.

But in so many other ways, he dealt with the unthinkable every day.

Even from a young age, he believed God kept him alive for a special purpose. He felt a pull to do something to give back like so many had given in the days and weeks after the bombing.

But becoming a firefighter or police officer or going into the military was out of the question because of his injuries.

Then a few years ago, PJ’s grandma suggested he look into avionics. 

“My grandma always knew I was fascinated with electronics,” he said, “just based on how many I took apart and didn’t put back together correctly in our house when I was growing up.”

Going into avionics might open up work at Tinker Air Force Base, and even though that wouldn’t be military service, it would be service to the military.

Sure enough, in early 2024, PJ took a job as an avionics technician at Tinker. He works on intricate parts of massive planes that are part of our country’s airborne forces. He believes the work is as close as he’s come to finding his purpose. 

Then again, perhaps part of what PJ is meant to do is what he’s doing every day – just living his life.

By doing that, he reminds us how far we’ve come. How we don’t have to be perfect to move forward. 

He still does breathing treatments every day, but it’s just his reality.

“If I was to wake up one day with a whole other lung and breathing quiet, that would feel abnormal,” he said. “Probably wouldn't know what to do.”

The impact the bombing had on PJ’s voice leaves him an ever-present reminder of that day. Even though he has no memory of the bombing, he remembers it every time he speaks.

So many injuries from that day healed and can be sometimes forgotten. But PJ doesn’t forget.

“My voice is always with me,” he said, “but it’s not something I feel bad about.

“It’s my voice. It’s unique. I like it that way.”

He wants it no other way because 30 years later, being reminded of the bombing brings gratitude. No one can change what happened, but so many carried change with them as they continued to evolve and grow and live.

Maybe we see it more with the children, the ones who had so much growing and changing to do. Or maybe they were meant to be the guideposts, the reminders of all that we have come through. 

“Very appreciative that I wake up every day,” he said. “Every year, I think about the journey and how I’ve grown and how people who are affected have grown.”

Growth that is imperfect.

Growth that is glorious.

Jenni Carlson can be reached at jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok.