WARMINGTON: Could ‘Waco apocalypse’ have been avoided?

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The flames shot so high and burned so hot that it looked and felt like the apocalypse.

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For the 76 Branch Davidians — including 28 children — who died on April 19, 1993 at Mount Carmel near Waco, Texas it was.

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After 51 days of standoff, following an initial bloody battle that resulted in four dead Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents and six followers of David Koresh, the FBI tried to smoke the stubborn people out.

Instead, most of them died from smoke inhalation and burns.

“There was panic, and somebody yelled there’s a fire,” Clive Doyle, who escaped to safety through a hole in the wall created by an intruding tank, once recalled.

His 18-year-old daughter Sherry was not so fortunate.

“I wish I didn’t lose my daughter,” the now deceased Australian told me in an interview on the Waco site in 2001. “For some reason I survived.”

So many did not.

As people commemorate 30 years since the Waco siege that ended with 86 dead, it all comes back to one question: Was it necessary for the American government to conduct a military-style raid on Feb. 28, 1993? Or could more time have been given to try to find a peaceful outcome?

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In my week on the ground in Waco, the common thought among those who lived near the Branch Davidian, Mount Carmel compound was that it would have been easy to arrest Koresh on any day without ever needing guns, let alone a SWAT-style team of dozens of federal agents.

“I saw him many times along the road here or in town,” said a man who lived on a country lane, close to the now infamous property where so many needlessly died. “Why didn’t they just pick him up?”

Instead, a team of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, with local media in tow, showed up with a no-knock warrant looking for illegal guns.

And that is indeed what they found.

A war broke out as a nasty firefight lit up the rural Texas flatlands 20 minutes from Waco. And as the bullets flew, people died. Four federal agents. Six Branch Davidian members. Many others on both sides of the battle were wounded.

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That was Day One. There would be more death.

One of the people wounded in that opening salvo of what would become a 51-day standoff, which ended April 19 in a massive fireball inferno, was the leader of this sect named David Koresh.

Born Vernon Wayne Howell, the 33-year-old had become Koresh, reportedly believing he was a prophet and the second coming of the Messiah.

In the many interviews he has done over the years and in his book, A Place Called Waco: A Survivor’s Story, David Thibodeau has said the people who lived in the compound were not following Koresh as much as his teachings.

In Thibodeau’s case, he was there more as a friend of Koresh’s and bandmate. As a drummer, he was recruited after meeting Koresh and his lieutenant Steve Schneider in a music shop in Hollywood in 1990.

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Thibodeau told me last week that while he felt the recent Netflix documentary “left out a lot,” he has given his stamp of approval on the six-part mini-series that was based on his book about what was going on inside and on former FBI agent Gary Noesner’s book, Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, about what was happening outside.

My small piece in this terrible situation is being a reporter out in that field 24/7.

It was surreal. The local phone company actually hooked up old-style phones right to the poles, which was helpful because it was difficult to maintain cellular connections with the technology of that time. We largely followed the FBI briefings, but I remember the under-siege members rolling out a sheet saying they “want the press.”

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As media reported on the FBI talking about Koresh’s wives and alleged the sexual abuse of children, those holed up inside wanted to tell their version of events.

They never got to do it.

Meanwhile, neighbours who had suspicions about the unusual compound they called a religious cult. But they also seemed unanimous that there was no need for the standoff – especially with so many children inside.

Noesner and the FBI were able to negotiate 35 people out – including 21 children – but in the end, 76 people died on that last day, including 28 children.

When I went back there to visit in 2001, I spoke to inferno survivor Clive Doyle who was still living on the property, which was under the custodianship of Rev. Charles Pace, originally of Collingwood, Ont.

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Doyle told me Koresh was so severely wounded from two gunshots – to his abdomen and wrist – that he was “incapacitated” for much of the standoff.

“We thought he was going to die,” recalled Doyle, who died in 2022. “He was just lying on a floor upstairs the whole time – propped up with pillows.”

Koresh did die on April 19, 1993 and there is still debate as to whether he committed suicide or had a follower shoot him in the head.

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Doyle said people wanted to surrender and many more would have come out before the fire if the FBI had taken a different approach towards them.

“We even had our bags packed. I packed a lunch,” he said.

But seeing every adult that came out was taken to jail, Doyle said there was trepidation.

Eventually, 51 days after the standoff began and with approval from then-attorney general Janet Reno, the FBI fired tear gas canisters inside and with tanks breached the compound, which soon lit up like a match. With no fire trucks in sight, it looked like a bomb had been dropped on the building.

Only nine souls came out alive.

Thirty-years later, as one side blames the other for the fire and carnage, one wonders how many people could have been saved if the situation had been handled differently.

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@joe_warmington