Waco siege

• 1. Introduction

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  The Waco siege, which ran from the 28th of February to the 19th of April 1993, began with a chance encounter. A local reporter, tipped off that federal agents were about to raid a religious compound, asked a US Postal Service mail carrier for directions. The carrier turned out to be the brother-in-law of the compound's leader, David Koresh. By then, the surprise the agents were counting on was gone.

  The compound was Mount Carmel Center, a ranch in unincorporated McLennan County, Texas, 13 miles northeast of the city of Waco. It belonged to the Branch Davidians, a religious group suspected of stockpiling illegal weapons. The raid became a gunfight. The gunfight became a 51-day standoff with the FBI. The standoff ended in flames.

  Nearly every major moment of the story is disputed. Who fired the first shot? Who started the fire that destroyed the buildings? And how did a small Texas church, with a long history of quarrels over land and leadership, end up facing the combined force of federal agencies?

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• 2. Prophecy and Property

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  In 1955, a split in the Shepherd's Rod movement, following the death of its founder Victor Houteff, gave rise to the Branch Davidians. Houteff had built the original Davidian group around a prophecy of an imminent apocalypse. That prophecy included the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the defeat of the evil armies of Babylon. His followers settled on a hilltop several miles east of Waco and named it Mount Carmel, after a mountain in Israel mentioned in Joshua 19:26. They later moved to a much larger site farther east.

  In 1959, Houteff's widow, Florence Houteff, announced that Armageddon was about to arrive. Members gathered at the center to wait. Many built houses, others lived in tents, trucks or buses, and most sold what they owned. When the prophecy failed, control of the site passed to Benjamin Roden, founder of the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventist Association. Roden taught beliefs that differed from Houteff's. After his death, his wife Lois Roden took over.

  Lois Roden did not think her son George was fit to be prophet. She groomed a younger man named Vernon Wayne Howell instead, who would later be known as David Koresh. A meeting in 1984 divided the community into two factions, one led by Howell and one by George Roden. Roden then ran Howell and his followers off Mount Carmel at gunpoint, and they resettled in Palestine, Texas.

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• 3. Koresh Takes Command

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  On the 3rd of November 1987, Howell and seven armed companions tried to get into the Mount Carmel chapel, hoping to photograph the body in the casket as evidence. Roden was warned about the intruders and opened fire. About 20 minutes into the gunfight, the Sheriff's Department arrived, and Roden had been wounded. Sheriff Harwell reached Howell by phone and told him to stop shooting and surrender. The press dubbed the eight men the "Rodenville Eight."

  They stood trial for attempted murder on the 12th of April 1988. Seven were acquitted, and the jury could not reach a verdict on Howell. Prosecutors did not press the case further. Defense attorney Gary Coker asked to bring the casket into court as evidence, but Judge Herman Fitts ruled that a courtroom was no place for it. Eight men, six of them defendants, had to carry it away from the courthouse and down the street to a waiting van. Asked about the body, Roden admitted he had tried to resurrect Hughes on three occasions.

  Roden's own legal troubles kept growing. He spent six months in jail over legal motions full of explicit language. In mid-1989, he killed a Davidian named Wayman Dale Adair with an axe. Adair had visited to discuss his alleged vision of being God's chosen messiah. Roden was found guilty under an insanity defense and committed to a mental hospital. Howell then raised the money to pay all the back taxes Roden owed on Mount Carmel and took legal control of the property. The group's attorney, Douglas Wayne Martin, noted in a 90-minute interview that the Davidians had been in and out of court since 1955.

  On the 5th of August 1989, Howell released an audiotape called "New Light." On it he said God had told him to father children with the women of the group to establish a "House of David" of his "special people." That meant separating married couples, with husbands agreeing that only he could have sexual relations with their wives while the men stayed celibate. He also said God wanted him to build an "Army for God" to prepare for the end of days.

  On the 15th of May 1990, Howell petitioned a California court in Pomona to change his name to Koresh "for publicity and business purposes." The petition was granted on the 28th of August. By 1992, the group had sold most of its land except a core of 77 acres. Many buildings had been removed or stripped for materials, and the main chapel and a tall water tank were being converted into apartments for resident members. Many families had belonged to the Davidians for generations, and that community of sold-off land and refitted buildings was what law enforcement began to study in May 1992.

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• 4. Building the Case

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  In May 1992, Chief Deputy Daniel Weyenberg of the McLennan County Sheriff's Department phoned the ATF with a report from a local UPS representative. A UPS driver said a package had broken open on delivery to the Branch Davidian residence and revealed at least half a dozen grenades. The driver added that the compound had been receiving packages from an arms dealer for months. On the 9th of June, the ATF opened a formal investigation. A week later it was classified as sensitive, which called for a high degree of oversight from both Houston and headquarters.

  On the 30th of July, ATF agents David Aguilera and Skinner visited the Davidians' gun dealer, Henry McMahon. He tried to get them to speak with Koresh by phone. Koresh offered to let the ATF inspect the group's weapons and paperwork and asked to talk with Aguilera, who declined. Sheriff Harwell told reporters, "Just go out and talk to them, what's wrong with notifying them?"

  The ATF also ran surveillance from a house across the road from the compound for several months. Its cover was poor. The supposed college students were in their thirties, drove new cars, were not registered at local schools, and kept hours that fit no job or class. An undercover agent, Robert Rodriguez, went inside the group. Koresh learned who he was but revealed it only on the day of the raid.

  Special Agent Aguilera's affidavit, filed on the 25th of February 1993, supplied the basis for the warrants. It described a postal worker who believed he had been delivering explosives to the Mag-Bag, the Davidians' ammunition and gun store. It listed cases of inert grenades, black gunpowder, 90 pounds of powdered aluminum and 30 to 40 cardboard tubes. It noted that the Mag-Bag had bought several AR-15 and M-16 parts kits. In November 1992, a farmer named Ben Hays told the sheriff he had heard machine-gun fire, likely a .50 caliber and multiple M-16s.

  Aguilera's own wording showed the limits of the evidence. The store had ordered over forty-five AR-15 upper receivers and five M-16 upper receivers. He wrote that these kits held every part of an M-16 except the lower receiver, which is the legally defined "firearm." In effect, he admitted that neither the noise nor the items ordered were necessarily illegal.

  The search warrant allowed a search on or before the 28th of February, in daylight hours between 6:00 am and 10:00 pm. The ATF suggested Koresh might be running a methamphetamine lab, which opened the door to military help under the war on drugs. In the end, the ATF received only a training site at Fort Hood from the 25th to the 27th of February, plus medical and communications support. The raid was code-named "Showtime" and set for Monday the 1st of March.

  The date moved up because of a newspaper series. Starting on the 1st of February, ATF agents met three times with Waco Tribune-Herald staff about delaying "The Sinful Messiah," by Mark England and Darlene McCormick. The articles reported allegations that Koresh abused children, took underage brides and claimed a right to at least 140 wives. The paper said it would publish regardless, and the first installment ran on the 27th of February.

  The ATF had preferred to arrest Koresh outside Mount Carmel but was wrongly told he rarely left. Locals knew the Davidians as cordial neighbors who sold at gun shows and kept careful paperwork. Paul Fatta was a federally licensed dealer, and shipments for the Mag-Bag were signed for by Fatta, Steve Schneider or Koresh. On the morning of the raid, Fatta and his son Kalani were driving to a gun show in Austin.

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• 5. Gunfire on Sunday

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  "They were praying." That was how undercover ATF agent Robert Rodriguez later described the Branch Davidians as he left Mount Carmel on the morning of Sunday the 28th of February 1993. Rodriguez had been astonished to find his cover had been blown. Koresh had told him that the Davidians knew a raid was imminent, and Rodriguez made an excuse and walked out.

  Warning signs had reached the ATF's own side. In audiotapes broadcast after the incident, the local sheriff said no one had told him about the raid. Yet a member of his department's support staff was embedded with the ATF planning team and is believed to have been the source of the media leak. The ATF commander was told the Davidians knew a raid was coming. He ordered it to go ahead anyway, though the plan depended on arriving before anyone inside was armed and ready.

  Survivors have written that Koresh ordered selected male followers to arm themselves and take defensive positions. Women and children were told to take cover in their rooms. Koresh said he would try to speak to the agents and that what happened next would depend on their intentions.

  At 9:45 am, a convoy of civilian vehicles carrying uniformed agents in SWAT-style gear arrived. Who fired first has never been definitively settled. ATF agents testified in court and at congressional hearings that the Branch Davidians shot first. Roland Ballesteros, one of the first agents out of the cattle trucks, told Texas Rangers and Waco police soon after that the first shots came from agents aiming at the Davidians' dogs. At the trial, he insisted the Davidians had fired first. The Davidians said the ATF door team opened fire at the front door and they shot back in self-defense.

  Three Army National Guard helicopters made a low pass as an aerial distraction, and all three took incoming fire. Early in the shooting, Koresh was hit in the hand and the stomach. Within a minute, Wayne Martin called emergency services and pleaded for a ceasefire. Tapes record him saying, "Here they come again!" and "That's them shooting! That's not us!"

  On the east side, agents leaned two ladders against the building and climbed onto the roof, heading for Koresh's room and a suspected weapons store. Three agents reached his window on the west slope and came under fire. One was killed and another wounded. Other agents smashed the armory window, threw in a flashbang and entered. They killed a Branch Davidian and found a cache of weapons, but heavy fire then wounded two of them. One agent fell from the roof after hitting his head on a wooden beam and survived.

  Dozens of agents took cover, many behind Branch Davidian vehicles. ATF agent Chuck Hustmyre later wrote: "About 45 minutes into the shootout, the volume of gunfire finally started to slacken. We were running out of ammunition. The Davidians, however, had plenty." The shooting lasted two hours in all, until Lieutenant Lynch of the McLennan County Sheriff Department negotiated a ceasefire. Sheriff Harwell said in the documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement that the agents withdrew only after running out of ammunition. The Davidians let the ATF dead and wounded be evacuated and held their fire during the retreat.

  Four ATF agents died: Steve Willis, Robert Williams, Todd McKeehan and Conway Charles LeBleu. Sixteen more were wounded. Five Branch Davidians died in the raid: Winston Blake, Peter Gent, Peter Hipsman, Perry Jones and Jaydean Wendell. Two of them were killed by fellow Davidians after being wounded. Nearly six hours after the 11:30 am ceasefire, ATF agents shot Michael Schroeder dead, alleging he fired a pistol as he tried to re-enter the compound.

  A report by Alan A. Stone concluded that the Davidians did not ambush the ATF and "apparently did not maximize the kill of ATF agents." Because federal agents had died, the FBI soon took command at the scene.

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• 6. The Long Standoff

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  Jeff Jamar, head of the FBI's San Antonio field office, became Site Commander after the ATF withdrew. The Hostage Rescue Team answered to Richard Rogers, who had already been criticized for his actions at the Ruby Ridge incident. As at Ruby Ridge, Rogers often overrode the site commander. He also sent both the Blue and Gold tactical teams to Waco, which left no reserves and added pressure to resolve things by force.

  At first, the Davidians spoke by phone with local news media, and Koresh gave interviews. Then the FBI cut that line. For the rest of the standoff, a group of 25 FBI negotiators talked with those inside by telephone. The final Justice Department report found that negotiators felt the tactical commanders kept undercutting their work.

  In the first few days, negotiators believed they had a breakthrough. Koresh agreed that his followers would leave peacefully if a message he recorded was broadcast on national radio. The broadcast aired, but Koresh then said God had told him to stay and "wait." Even so, negotiators won the release of 19 children, aged from five months to 12 years, who came out without their parents. Ninety-eight people remained inside.

  The FBI and Texas Rangers interviewed the children, some for hours at a time. Allegedly, the children had been physically and sexually abused long before the standoff. The FBI gave this allegation to President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno as the key reason to use CS gas. On Monday the 8th of March, day nine, the Davidians sent out a videotape. In it, Koresh introduced his children and his "wives," including several minors who said they had borne his babies. He had fathered perhaps 14 of the children who stayed inside. The tape was meant to show there were no hostages. Negotiators worried that releasing it to the media would win sympathy for Koresh, and 23 children were still inside.

  Negotiators treated the standoff as a hostage crisis, and Koresh's talk, dense with Biblical imagery, wore them down. Among themselves, they called it "Bible babble." On the 7th of March, the FBI began consulting Bible scholars Phillip Arnold and James Tabor, who studied a transcript of Koresh's radio message. The pair appeared on Dallas radio stations KRLB and KGBS, and Koresh heard the programs on a battery-powered radio. On the 16th of March he asked permission to discuss the Bible with Arnold directly, and the FBI said no.

  On the 1st of April, Tabor told radio host Ron Engleman that the Apostle Paul wrote much of the New Testament from prison. In the same way, he said, Koresh's message would reach a wider audience if he surrendered peacefully. On the 4th of April, Koresh's lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, delivered a tape of that broadcast to him. According to eyewitness David Thibodeau, Koresh responded favorably.

  Inside the FBI, two factions formed, one favoring negotiation and the other force. Outside the compound, the pressure grew. Recordings of jet planes, pop music, Buddhist chanting and the screams of slaughtered rabbits played all night to deprive the Davidians of sleep. Nine M3 Bradley vehicles and five M728 Combat Engineer Vehicles from the US Army patrolled the grounds. They flattened fencing and outbuildings and crushed cars, and they drove repeatedly over the grave of Peter Gent despite protests from the Davidians and the negotiators. The FBI cut power and water, so those inside lived on rainwater and military MRE rations. Jack Zimmerman, the attorney for Steve Schneider, later said the aim seemed to be driving an unstable man crazy and then resenting his irrational behavior.

  Koresh ordered a group of followers to leave. Eleven people did, and they were arrested as material witnesses, with one charged with conspiracy to murder. The children's willingness to stay disturbed negotiators, who were unprepared for the group's religious zeal. The children knew that an earlier group of children who left with some women had been separated at once, and the women arrested.

  Scholars who study apocalyptic groups warned the FBI that its tactics would reinforce the Davidians' belief that they were in a Biblical end-times confrontation of cosmic significance. That, they said, raised the chance of a deadly outcome. A 1999 federal report later described Waco as an illustration of defensive violence. It observed that groups withdrawing from mainstream culture seldom act on the belief that the endtime has come unless provoked.

  Rick Alan Ross, a self-described cult expert, appeared on NBC and CBS in the weeks before the raid. He said the ATF consulted him in January 1993 and that he contacted the FBI on the 4th of March. The FBI says it did not rely on him for advice, though it interviewed him and received his input. On the 27th and the 28th of March, he phoned to suggest embarrassing Koresh by telling other members about Koresh's faults and failures. Arnold and Tabor later argued that the crisis need not have ended tragically if the FBI had been more open to Religious Studies and better able to separate Ross's dubious ideas from scholarly expertise.

  From the 5th until the 13th of April, Koresh refused to speak with the FBI, citing the Passover holiday. Impatient planners considered using snipers to kill Koresh and other key Davidians. The FBI feared a mass suicide like the one at Jim Jones' Jonestown in 1978. Koresh repeatedly denied any such plan, and people leaving the compound had seen no preparation for one.

  On the 14th of April, Koresh sent a letter to DeGuerin that was his last contact with the outside world. "I am working night and day to complete my final work of the writing out of these Seals," he wrote. He promised to come out as soon as people like Jim Tabor and Phil Arnold had a copy. Some in the FBI saw a breakthrough, while others ridiculed it as a delay tactic. Psychologist Murray Miron of Syracuse University examined it with four other letters. His report of the 15th of April said Koresh showed "all the hallmarks of rampant, morbidly virulent paranoia." The final decision would go to Attorney General Janet Reno, who had only recently taken office.

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• 7. The Last Morning

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  "Finally, I told her that if she thought it was the right thing to do, she could go ahead." That was how President Clinton later recounted approving the final plan. Reno had accepted the Hostage Rescue Team's recommendation to attack after hearing that conditions inside were worsening and children were being abused. Clinton recalled the 1985 siege of The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in Arkansas, which ended with no deaths after a blockade with no deadline. He suggested similar tactics. Reno replied that the team was tired of waiting and that the standoff cost a million dollars a week. She said the Davidians could outlast that Arkansas group and that child abuse and mass suicide were imminent risks.

  Her stated reasons shifted over the following months. She first said the Hostage Rescue Team had told her Koresh was sexually abusing children and beating babies, and the team later denied having evidence of child abuse during the standoff. She also said Linda Thompson's "Unorganized Militia of the United States" was heading to Waco, either to help Koresh or to attack him.

  The assault began on the 19th of April 1993. The Hostage Rescue Team brought .50 caliber rifles and armored Combat Engineering Vehicles. The vehicles were to punch holes in the walls with explosives and pump in CS gas to push people out without harming them. The stated plan called for rising amounts of gas over two days. Officially, there would be no armed assault. Loudspeakers would tell the Davidians so and ask them not to fire on the vehicles. According to the FBI, agents could return fire, but no federal agent fired a shot that day.

  At 5:50 am, agents phoned the compound to warn that tank activity was about to begin and told residents to take cover. The person who answered threw the phone and its line out the front door. Around 6:00 am, FBI listening devices planted in a wall recorded a voice asking, "Pablo, have you poured it yet?" Five minutes later, an armored vehicle ripped a hole 8 feet high and 10 feet wide in the front wall. By 6:31 am, the entire building had been gassed. At 9:00 am, the Davidians unfurled a banner reading "We want our phone fixed."

  Around noon, three fires broke out almost at once in different parts of the building, and television crews broadcast them live. The first visible flames appeared at 12:07 pm in two spots at the front, with a third at the back. Ruth Riddle walked out with a floppy disk in her jacket holding Koresh's Manuscript on the Seven Seals. An emergency call went out at 12:12 pm. Waco fire trucks reached a checkpoint at 12:22 and were held there until 12:37. They arrived at the compound at 12:43. A large explosion at 12:25 was later identified as a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion from an LPG cylinder. By 12:55 pm, the fire was burning out and the compound was leveled.

  Nine people left the building during the fire, and 76 Branch Davidians died, among them 20 to 28 children and Koresh. Many were killed by smoke or carbon monoxide, others were buried by rubble, suffocated or shot. According to the FBI, Steve Schneider shot Koresh and then himself. Autopsies found that at least 20 had been shot, including five children under 14. Three-year-old Dayland Gent was stabbed in the chest. Some women and children found beneath a fallen concrete wall in a storage room had died of skull injuries. The medical examiner believed these were mercy killings by Davidians trapped in the fire. An expert retained by the US Office of Special Counsel said many of the gunshot wounds "support self-destruction either by overt suicide, consensual execution (suicide by proxy), or less likely, forced execution."

  Department of Justice reports from October 1993 and July 2000 concluded that the Branch Davidians started the fire, even though incendiary CS gas canisters had been used. They cited audio recordings of specific talk between Koresh and others about pouring more fuel on piles of hay as the fires began. They also cited aerial footage showing at least three simultaneous ignition points. Recorded voices that morning mention cans of fuel, and later remarks include "I want a fire" and "Keep that fire going." Surviving Davidians testified that Coleman fuel had been poured, and fire experts in Danforth's report agreed "without question" that people inside started multiple accelerated fires.

  Critics answer that law enforcement did fire live rounds and that gunshots combined with flammable CS gas caused the fire. Some survivors and experts hold that the assault itself started it, possibly through pyrotechnic rounds. The FBI says the only military gas rounds fired were three pyrotechnic rounds at a concrete construction pit at 8:08 am, and they bounced off. The Justice Department found benzene, a component of solvent-based CS gas, on only one body. It added that gas insertion had ended nearly an hour before the fire, enough time for solvents to fade. Two University of Maryland fire protection engineers concluded the residents had time to escape. The Texas Rangers' arson report noted that debris from breaching the west end could have blocked an escape route through the tunnel system.

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• 8. Verdicts and Legacy

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  On the 3rd of August 1993, a federal grand jury returned a ten-count indictment against 12 surviving Branch Davidians. The charges included conspiring to murder federal officers, aiding and abetting that murder, and unlawfully possessing and using firearms. The government dismissed the charges against one defendant under a plea bargain. After a trial of nearly two months, the jury acquitted four on every charge and cleared all of them of the murder-related counts. It convicted five on lesser charges, including aiding and abetting the voluntary manslaughter of federal agents, and eight on firearms charges.

  Sentences ran up to 40 years. Livingstone Fagan and Renos Lenny Avraam, both British, were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and using a firearm during a crime. Ruth Riddle, a Canadian, was convicted of using or carrying a weapon during a crime. Paul Gordon Fatta was convicted of conspiracy to possess machine guns. Kathy Schroeder received three years after pleading guilty to a reduced charge of forcibly resisting arrest.

  The appeals reached the Supreme Court. In United States v. Branch in 1996, the Fifth Circuit vacated the machine-gun sentences but left the verdicts in place. The Supreme Court later held that the term "machine gun" in the statute is an element of the offense for a jury to decide, not a sentencing factor for a judge. On the 19th of September 2000, Judge Walter Smith cut 25 years from the sentences of five Davidians and five years from a sixth. All had been released by July 2007.

  Thirty-three British citizens were among the Davidians during the siege. Two who survived were arrested as material witnesses and held for months without trial. Derek Lovelock spent seven months in McLennan County Jail, often in solitary confinement. Livingstone Fagan says guards beat him, particularly at Leavenworth, and that he was doused with cold water from a high-pressure hose before an industrial fan blasted cold air at him. He was moved between at least nine facilities and refused exercise because he was strip-searched each time. He was deported to the UK in July 2007 and kept his religious beliefs.

  Several survivors and more than a hundred relatives of the dead or injured sued the United States, federal officials, former Texas governor Ann Richards and members of the Texas Army National Guard. The trial ran from the 19th of June through the 14th of July 2000 before Judge Walter S. Smith Jr., with a five-member advisory jury. The jury found the United States had not acted negligently. On the 20th of September 2000, Smith entered a "take-nothing" judgment. He ruled that ATF agents returned fire to protect themselves. He also found that the plan to use tear gas, including the choice not to plan for a fire, was a discretionary function the government could not be sued over. The Fifth Circuit rejected the claim that Smith should have stepped aside and affirmed in Andrade v. Chojnacki in 2003.

  A missing door became its own controversy. During the siege, Steve Schneider told the FBI that "the evidence from the front door will clearly show how many bullets and what happened." Houston attorney Dick DeGuerin testified that metal protruding on the inside of the right-hand entry door showed the bullet holes were made by incoming rounds. At trial, the government presented the left-hand door and said the right-hand door had been lost. Texas Trooper Sgt. David Keys testified that he saw two men loading what could have been the missing door into a U-Haul van. He did not see the object itself. Michael Caddell, lead attorney in the wrongful death suit, said the door was lost on purpose, but he offered no evidence, and the claim has never been proven. Fire investigators called it extremely unlikely that the right steel door was damaged much more than the left. The right door is still missing.

  John Magaw, the new ATF Director, criticized several aspects of the raid and made the Treasury "Blue Book" report on Waco required reading for new agents. A 1995 Government Accountability Office report noted that in October 1995 the ATF decided dynamic entry would be planned only after all other options had been considered. The FBI also reviewed its methods. It put greater emphasis on crisis negotiation, set up specialized negotiation teams, and strengthened Hostage Rescue Team training and equipment. It stressed cooperation among agencies, improved intelligence analysis and wrote after-action lessons into training.

  A small chapel built years after the siege now stands on the site and is still used by the remaining Branch Davidians for worship and memorial. A plaque honors the four ATF agents killed in the shootout, and the barbed wire authorities used to hem in the group remains on the grounds. Critics blame the ATF's poor planning, execution and communication, along with an exaggerated threat assessment, for the deaths of the women and children. For those critical of government generally, Waco has become a "symbol of government oppression."

  Timothy McVeigh named Ruby Ridge and Waco as the main reasons he and Terry Nichols planned the Oklahoma City bombing. They carried it out on the 19th of April 1995, exactly two years after the fire. The siege is also linked to the modern American militia movement.

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