Prosecutors showed jurors surveillance camera pictures of a Ryder truck slowly moving toward the Oklahoma City federal building just two minutes before an explosion ripped the building apart.
The photographs, from the Regency Towers apartments just down the street, showed the Ryder truck creeping by in the background outside the apartment lobby. It stays 21 seconds. The truck moves forward a couple of feet and then pauses three more seconds before leaving at what is timed at 8:59:55 a.m.At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, killing 168 people and injuring more than 500.
"This is the first photograph . . . showing a Ryder truck?" prosecutor Larry Mackey asked the apartments' maintenance man, Richard Nichols.
"Yes, sir," Nichols replied.
Jurors could see a Ford Festiva driven by Nichols' wife, Bertha, and carrying their nephew, Chad, as it pulled up to the curb in front of the building's glass doors.
On the far side of the one-way street the Ryder truck emerges in the frame, the word "Ryder" clearly visible. The driver of the truck is not visible.
Nichols' voice cracked as he spoke about his wife and how he could have been in front of the federal building at the time of the explosion.
Nichols said he was was two minutes late to take his nephew to a doctor's appointment.
"I took about two steps when there was a terrific explosion. We felt heat and pressure and it kind of spun us around a little bit," Nichols said.
"I grabbed (my wife). She asked what happened," he said.
"She yelled out, `What's going on?' " I thought the boilers blowed up. . . . We made a lunge for the car, because my little nephew, he was in the car."
Just then the axle from the Ryder truck smashed into the hood of the small car, pushing it 8 to 10 feet up on a curb. Nichols' wife and nephew survived with just bumps and bruises.