In April 1995, hundreds of survivors were from the rubble of the bombed federal government building in Oklahoma City, but only one of them can thank obesity for life.
Thirty years ago, Amy Downs, was a 28-year-old loan officer in a federal credit union who described itself as an unfortunate married college drop-out who comforted her to eat her way to 355 pounds.
Speaking with the Daily Mail for the 30th anniversary of the worst act of terrorism of America, Downs reveals how overweight saved her and how the tragedy brought her into a better path.
She has gradually turned her life around the past three decades, adopted a more positive attitude, throws weight, competes in a triathlon and her way to become CEO of the Credit Union.
While she is celebrating her 58th birthday, Downs is a trim, divorced and remarried motivating speaker who lives in a beautiful house with cathedral ceilings in Medicine Park, an hour's drive from the explosion site.
She warns against the 'hatred' and 'evil' embraced by Timothy McVeigh, the veteran of the army who killed 168 people, including 19 children, and shows how survivors can pick up the pieces after a tragedy.
“I was dealing with a lot of trauma because 18 of my 33 colleagues were killed that day,” says Downs.
“It was a bit of time before I got the traction to say,” Okay, I want to do this. I want to lead my life with intention and goal. ” But when I did, I got that momentum, and I just went on. '
When Amy Downs was pulled out of the rubble of Oklahoma City's bouncing, she promised God that she would turn her life around
At the time, the 28-year-old College-Out had excavated comfortably to be 355 pounds
The morning of April 19, 1995 was somewhat cold, but like any other day, because Downs, her 'family' of Credit Union colleagues and federal employees, submitted in the Alfred P. Murrah building in the center of Oklahoma City.
But 'everything changed' at 9.02 am, she says.
McVeigh had parked a truck in the plot outside, full of a deadly, explosive cocktail of agricultural fertilizers, diesel fuel and other chemicals. The anti-governmental conspiracy theorist illuminated two fuses and ran.
Seconds later, the area looked like a war zone. A third of the building was reduced to rubble, with many floors flattened as pancakes.
Dozens of cars were burned and more than 300 nearby buildings were damaged or destroyed.
The Downs office was on the third floor; Her desk was 20 ft of the windows. She remembers that they came around, three floors down, upside down in her chair, panting to air in the blackness of dust and debris.
“My weight may have saved my life,” she says.
'I weighed 355 pounds, so my chair was stuck to me and it helped me to protect a little. And when the third and fourth floor of the building broke off, the large, heavy pieces of concrete behind me and created a small cocoon that protected me. '
Downs caught that terrible day, she says. Her leg was cut into the bone, but debris was so tightly packed around the limb that it kept bleeding and saving her a surgical amputation.
“My story has a happy ending, and not everyone did it,” she says.
A National Geographic documentary, Oklahoma City Bombing: One Day in America, tells the story of Downs, other survivors and the rescue teams who have taken people out of the rubble for the next three days.
It follows the Klopjacht, McVeigh's arrest and ultimately conviction about federal charges and execution. His accomplice Terry Nichols received several prison sentences for his share in the bombing.
It contains interviews with the then President Bill Clinton and other officials, who initially wondered which foreign group had planted the bomb and was then astonished for an American and former service member.
Downs brings the six o'clock in the show that she 'waiting, waiting, waiting to die' and to tell saviors that she would bake chocolate flakes if they save her – a promise she was good later.
A third of the Alfred P. Murrah building was reduced to debris, with many floors flattened as pancakes
Downs' Credit Union was on the third floor of the building in the center of Oklahoma City
Medical employees run away from the building after they were told that another bombing was found
Downs calls bomber Timothy McVeigh a “narcissist, cold -blooded monster.” He was executed by fatal injection in 2001
She was one of the last people who was pulled out alive. While she was taken away from the wreck on a stretcher, looked up down and told God that she would prove her value and “never regards life as a matter of course,” she says.
After recovering for eight days in the hospital, she soon got back to work, rebuilding the credit union as a way to concentrate on something other than the trauma of losing so many loved colleagues.
She gave birth to a son, went back to the university for a diploma and MBA and underwent a stomach shelter operation in 2008 to tackle the chronic weight problem that threatened to place her in an early grave.
She ran, swam and cycled to keep the weight away and eventually became a Buff Ironman triathlete. Her 2020 book, Hope is a verb, describes her self-proclaimed 'journey of impossible transformation'.
Downs ended an unhappy marriage, remarried and rebuilt her relationship with God.
She eventually became CEO of her Allegiance Credit Union; And this month has been taken to become a motivating speaker full -time.
“It is small, consistent steps over time, one after the other, which lead to amazing transformation,” she says.
Because Downs has continued for the past 30 years, Oklahoma City also has, where she lived until last year.
The bombarded federal building was later built on the site with the breed and a park and a memorial.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum has 168 stones and glass seats in rows on a lawn, one for each victim.
McVeigh was executed by fatal injection in 2001. Nichols, 69, serves life in a supermax prison in Colorado without the possibility of conditional release.
A child and a woman injured in a truck beam in Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
Dozens of cars were burned and more than 300 nearby buildings were damaged or destroyed
Firefighter Chris Fields has one of the 19 infants who died as a result of their injuries in the explosion. The federal building had a daycare center on the first floor
A National Geographic documentary tells the story of Downs, other survivors and the rescue teams that people have taken out of the rubble
Both men were former US Army soldiers and associated with the extreme right -wing and militant patriot movement, which rejects the legitimacy of the federal government and law enforcement.
McVeigh's hatred was fed by a government attack on a Christian cult near Waco, Texas, who killed 76 people, and an impasse in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, who left a 14-year-old boy, his mother and a federal agent.
Downs attended the McVeigh process in Denver, Colorado, in 1997. She calls him a “narcissist” who succumbed to extremism and hatred and whose execution came as a “enormous relief.”
The daughter of a veteran from the Second World War says she still can't understand how “an American, one of our people, did,” she says, but does not think about what a 'cold -blooded monster' motivates.
“I choose to concentrate on how we conquered instead of the evil it caused,” she says.
