Speaker opposes death penalty despite loss, national tragedy

When Bud Welch went to work on April 19, 1995, he planned to meet his daughter Julie at lunchtime. They met every Wednesday and went to a Greek restaurant close to where she worked as a Spanish translator in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Julie had an appointment at 9 a.m. with a Mexican man who needed some help because he didn't speak English. \nAs she and her client were walking back to her office, a Ryder truck bomb exploded, killing her and 167 others. \nBud Welch, who won the 2001 Frederick Douglass Award for working to abolish the death penalty, had always opposed capital punishment. Friday night at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 2120 N. Fee Lane in Bloomington, he said for the first month after Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested, he didn't even want a trial. He said he "wanted them fried."\nWelch was invited to Bloomington to share his story of grief and reconciliation by the Bloomington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the Unitarian Universalist Chalice Series, IU Amnesty International, Indiana Citizens to Abolish Capital Punishment, the Department of Criminal Justice and the Criminal Justice Student Association. \nIn his grief after the Oklahoma City bombing, Welch went through nine months of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day and drinking himself to sleep every night. He went to visit the bomb site every day because that was the place he felt closest to his daughter. \nOne day in late January 1996, as he stood across the street from the wreckage feeling the effects of a hangover, he asked himself what needed to happen for him to move on. Did he need trials? Did he need convictions? Did he need executions?\n"After struggling with those questions for about three weeks, I finally reached the point that I understood that to take Tim McVeigh or Terry Nichols from their cages and kill them would be an act of revenge and hate," Welch said. "And revenge and hate are the very reasons that Julie and 167 others are dead in that great city today." \nBill Breeden, a Unitarian Minister and member of the Bloomington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, appreciated Welchs down-to-earth attitude. \n"He's a really authentic human being. He's a common working-class guy who didn't have to get a Ph.D. in human relations to figure out the power of forgiveness," Breeden said. "Forgiveness is really for the forgiver more than for the forgiven. That's the healing power of that message."\nRevenge and hate are natural feelings when a loved one is killed, Welch said, but they do not bring the healing someone in that position needs. He stopped drinking and smoking and began working to abolish the death penalty. Today he travels across the country and around the world in his work. His daughter's memory is his inspiration.\nJulie started a chapter of Amnesty International in high school and was active in many causes, including abolishing the death penalty. She hung signs in her window at college when there was something she didn't believe in, Welch said, until the Jesuit priests at Marquette University made her take them down.\n"Julie had that little white flag that she carried, if you will," he said. "She no longer can carry it, and I'm going to carry that flag until the day I die."\nAs time passed, memories Welch had suppressed surrounding the bombing began to surface. Welch said he remembered seeing a television interview with Bill McVeigh and recognized the face of a grieving father. He decided one day that he would tell McVeigh that he knew how he felt and that he did not blame him or his family for what his son had done. \nThree years later, he was speaking in western New York and had a chance to meet Bill McVeigh and his daughter Jennifer in person. As he sat at the kitchen table next to a wall covered with family snapshots, Welch said his eyes returned again and again to an eight by 10 inch photo of Tim McVeigh. Feeling self-conscious and not knowing what to say, Welch made the comment, "God, what a good looking kid.\n"You could have heard a pin drop in that kitchen when I said that," Welch said. "After the long silence ended, Bill looked up at the wall and very simply said, 'That's Tim's high school graduation picture.' When he said that I saw this great big tear roll out of his right eye. I could see at that moment a love a father had for a son that was incredible."\nBefore leaving, Welch told Jennifer that he didn't want her brother to die and he would do everything he could to prevent it. Welch said he found the visit extremely cathartic.\n"What I found that Saturday morning in western New York was a bigger victim in the Oklahoma City bombing than myself. I travel all over the country, in fact, all over the world speaking. I brag on Julie," Welch said. "But when Bill McVeigh meets a stranger, he is never permitted to say one nice thing that his son might have done in elementary school or high school or just simply growing up."\nWelch said the execution of Tim McVeigh was a "staged political event."\n"It's all about politics," Welch said. "With the exception of Tim McVeigh, the only ones we kill in this country are the easy ones. By the easy ones, I mean the poor ones. We currently have 121 on death row in McAlester, Okla., and not a single one had the money to pay for a lawyer in their own defense."\nWelch contrasted these people with O.J. Simpson or John Dupont, who both had enough money to pay the best lawyers and got off with a light sentence or no sentence at all.\nSophomore Kerry Spalding, co-coordinator of IU's Amnesty International chapter, sat in the audience at Welch's talk.\n"I think Bud Welch provides a very personal side of the (death penalty) issue," she said. "It can be a very hard question when people ask you 'What if your sister was killed? What if your dad or your mom?' And it's hard to answer if you haven't been through that experience. It's hard to say 'I would never want the death penalty used.' He's been through the experience, and he's been able to offer a voice from that side.