Life goes on. And life, as they say, is beautiful.
It has been 16 years since David and Doris Young took 154 students and teachers hostage in a 30-by-30-foot Cokeville Elementary classroom in Cokeville, Wyo. (population 500), threatening to blow everyone to "a brave new world" with 10 guns and a bomb.
After 2 1/2 hours of terror, the bomb went off accidentally. Seventy-nine people were injured, but the Youngs were the only ones to die — David Young shot his severely burned wife, then himself.
Many seasons pass in 16 years. Wounds heal, marred classrooms are scrubbed, repaired and reused. Children grow up and move away, leaving parents with many memories, of which the bombing is only one.
"You move on," Gina Taylor Madsen says. "You have to live life."
Madsen personifies Cokeville's progress simply by being who she is. She is the youngest survivor of the 1986 Cokeville bombing. And she was married last week in the Salt Lake LDS Temple.
"I feel extremely lucky that she made it to me," says her new husband, Brandt Madsen.
Wedding pictures show a large, smiling family and a beautiful, unscarred bride — quite different from a picture taken in 1986 in which Gina's head, neck and hands are swathed in pressure bandages, her right eye bloodied, a large bandage across her nose.
Gina was among the most severely injured of the victims. Doctors believed she would lose the sight in her right eye. But against the odds, Gina's sight has fully returned. She has a tiny scar on her right cheek, and the back of her right hand is slightly "splotchy," as she puts it, not enough to notice unless you're looking carefully.
That's it.
"I'm a very lucky girl," she says.
Gina (pronounced "Jenna") was in afternoon kindergarten when the Youngs drove a white van to the school, unloaded their weapons and herded everyone into the classroom. She remembers being in the crowded room, with the man and wife directing things, and being scared.
"I didn't understand it, but I knew it wasn't right," she said.
A grocery cart full of equipment — a gasoline "dead man" bomb — sat in the middle of the room.
Having been herded in with his own class, Gina's fifth-grade brother Michael sat by the window. He could see Gina across the room, but he didn't dare move to go get her. People were crammed into the room.
The smell of gasoline was acrid and overpowering. Michael and Gina both got headaches.
Michael was afraid.
Two other brothers, John and Matthew, and Gina's father, Steve, a teacher, were in Cokeville High School four blocks away. The P.A. blared the news of the elementary school crisis, and the student body gathered in the auditorium, where they prayed.
"That's about all I remember — going down to the auditorium to have a prayer," John said.
Avoiding the barricades and police honeycombing the town, Matthew ran to intercept his mother, Jane, who was driving home from her own teaching job in Geneva, Idaho. (Cokeville lies near the confluence of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming.) They met up, then joined Steve and John at a barricade two blocks from the elementary school.
Their house, one street from the school, was also blocked off.
They stood at the barricade a long time, watching the silent school.
Robby, the oldest brother, had just arrived in Casper, Wyo., for a track meet when the team saw the drama unfolding on their motel television. There was an initial erroneous report that several people had been killed. Panicked, Robby tried to call home, but all the circuits were busy. He could do nothing but nervously watch and wait.
"They didn't correct (the report) for, like, 10 minutes," he said.
It took Michael two hours to summon the nerve to walk across the room, past David Young. He retrieved Gina, took her back to his spot, and provided her with crayons and coloring book. He sat on his chair. She lay on the floor facing the bomb, coloring.
Thirty minutes later, David Young went to the bathroom, transferring the trigger switch to his wife's wrist. A teacher told Doris Young she had a headache, motioning to her head. Young, momentarily forgetting that her husband had rigged the switch to activate by raising her wrist above her head, imitated the gesture.
The bomb went off.
Only one of the five blasting caps detonated, but the blast still blew Michael back in his chair — fortunately for him, since the chair and his clothed body took most of the blast. Only his ears were burned.
Gina, on the other hand, took the blast's full force in her face and hands. The right side of her face and her right hand were the most severely injured, leading Michael to conjecture that she had covered the left side of her face with her right hand. The room was immediately plunged into darkness.
"I remember the noise when the bomb went off," Gina said. "The dark and the noise."
While David Young was sealing the fate of himself and his wife, Michael took Gina to a window and lowered her out of it, then clambered out himself,
The watchers at the barricade saw a puff of black smoke come out of the top of the school. Screams. Then a crowd of children began streaming from the windows and down the street.
"You couldn't discern one kid from another," Matthew said. "They were all black."
The waiting parents broke through the barricade, frantically searching for their children. Matthew and Jane, the mother, found Gina. Jane told Matthew to run to their house and put cold rags on Gina's face while she searched for Michael.
Gina's recollection of the whole episode is vague, but she clearly remembers being held by Matthew in the bathroom and seeing herself in the mirror.
It's a vivid memory for Matthew, too.
"It was awful," he said. "Her skin was peeling off her. And the smell was something I'll never forget." The smell of burnt flesh.
"It's not good to be in a bomb," Gina told Matthew.
Treating Michael's burns was relatively straightforward. Gina, on the other hand, spent many days in Utah's Logan Regional Hospital, undergoing painful bandage changes. She got lots of visitors, and lots of teddy bears. She likes teddy bears still.
For two years, Gina's face could not be exposed to direct sunlight, so she wore wide-brimmed hats wherever she went. "We shopped every store for a hat," her mother said.
Her cheerful disposition quickly returned, but there were a few lasting effects. Sometime later the family went to a fireworks show, and the noise brought it all back. Gina hid her face and cried. Her father held her close.
"She just about climbed right through me," Steve Taylor said.
She was afraid of white vans and strange men. To this day, fireworks make her jumpy.
But this is a strong girl, and a strong family. They pulled together. They counted their blessings, Gina's survival chief among them.
"Those brothers toted her around," their mother Jane said. "I can't even describe how she was pampered."
Gina grew up. She went to Brigham Young University, where she's about to graduate in nursing. She met and fell in love with Brandt Madsen. She is grateful for life.
"This whole thing was really a miracle for our family," Matthew said. "If you look at (Gina), she's beautiful. She's not scarred, physically or emotionally."
"I don't know if a negative side effect (from the bombing) exists," John said. "But I know that a whole lot of positive side effects exist."
Jane now teaches at Cokeville Elementary, in the classroom adjoining the classroom. The latter is now a lab. The only memento of the bombing is the room's clock, different from all other clocks in the school because the bomb destroyed the old one.
"Every time we go in there we notice that clock," Michael said.
Robby's track meet was held the next day, as scheduled. He ran the quarter-mile in 50.1 seconds, second in the state and a Cokeville High School record that still stands.
"I had something to run for," he said.
E-mail: aedwards@desnews.com