Seconds From Disaster

Michael Fortier

BORN: 1968 Sentenced to 12 years in prison on May 27, 1998. Released on January 26, 2006 after serving 10+years. Biography Michael Joseph Fortier was born in Maine in 1968, then moved with his family to Kingman, Arizona at age seven. After graduating from Kingman High, Fortier entered the army, where he met Timothy McVeigh at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1988. The company, which also included Terry Nichols, moved on to Fort Riley, Kansas, where Fortier served until his honorable discharge in May 1991.Fortier shared a common interests with his friends McVeigh and Nichols. All considered themselves marksmen and all had contempt for the federal government. At McVeigh's urging, Fortier read The Turner Diaries, a book seen as inciting violent action against an overreaching federal government.After his stint in the service, Fortier returned to Kingman where he enrolled in Mohave Community College and worked part-time in a printing shop and a hardware store. He was known locally for his parti...

Timothy J. McVeigh

BORN: 4/23/1968 On June 13, 1997, jury sentenced to death. Executed on June 11, 2001. Biography McVeigh was the second of three children born to William and Mildred McVeigh in Lockport, New York. His parents' troubled marriage ended when McVeigh was 10, and from that point on he lived mostly with his father. By the time his mother left the family, McVeigh had already developed a facination with guns. Four years later, McVeigh began stockpiling food and camping equipment in preparation for a nuclear attack or communist overthrow of the government.McVeigh performed well on standardized tests in high school and did not miss a single day of school. Still, he struck classmates as somewhat introverted and disengaged, and his only extracurricular activity was track. Under the entry "future plans" in his high school yearbook, McVeigh wrote: "Take it as it comes, buy a Lamborghini, California girls." Despite his reference to "California girls," McVeigh seemed u...

Terry Nichols

BORN: 4/1/1955 On June 4, 1998, sentenced to life in prison. Serving sentence in federal prison in Florence, Colo. Biography Terry Nichols grew up, as one of four children of Robert and Joyce Nichols, on a family farm in Lapeer, Michigan. A shy boy and an uninspired student, Nichols graduated in 1973 from Lapeer High School with a 2.6 grade point average.After one year at Central Michigan University, Nichols returned to Lapeer to help his recently divorced father with the family farm. Nichols married Lana Walsh in 1981 and the couple had a son the following year. Nichols paid the bills with a variety of jobs, ranging from managing a grain elevator, to doing carpentry work and selling life insurance.In May 1988, at age 33, Nichols joined the Army. He met Timothy McVeigh in basic training at Fort Benning, and their friendship continued to grow as the two served in Fort Riley, Kansas. Nichols and McVeigh shared a common hostility to gun control and a common belief in the importance of sur...

The Oklahoma City Bombing

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