For some reason, Hull stopped just
a moment to pick up the dead baby
and straighten out its arm. “I heard
a huge gasp,” Hull says. “And blood
burst from the wounds, as if jostling
the body somehow started the heart
going.”
Hull pressed the infant against his
chest, holding the mangled arm in
place, and began crawling upward
through the heavy rubble. He and
his fellow officers had been handing
off living victims in a sort of bucket
brigade to the outside. But Hull was
afraid the baby’s arm would fall off if
he did that. So he struggled on.
When the baby stopped gasping,
Hull began to administer rudimentary
CPR, breathing into the child’s mouth
and nose. This happened twice on the
way out. As Hull broke from the build-
ing and headed for the closest triage
area, he found himself screaming over
and over, “Breathe, baby, breathe!”
As he reached an ambulance, Hull
saw a couple running toward him—
the woman screaming that it was
her baby in his arms. Hull swiveled
away, not letting them see the child.
“I couldn’t let them look,” he says. “It
was too horrible. The baby probably
wasn’t going to make it, and I didn’t
want that to be the last sight they had.”
“Hold the arm tight!” he yelled to
a paramedic, finally handing the
baby off.
It was 9:30 a.m., and Hull, like
so many others, would be there for
hours—until he quit from exhaustion.childcare center. It was obvious that
those children were the highest pri-
ority for rescue. With sirens drowning
out the crescendo of screams, rescu-
ers by the hundreds began to arrive.
They struggled into the jagged heaps
of rubble, seeking America’s Kids on
the second floor.
But soon they realized there was
no childcare center. There was no
second floor.
What rescuers did find as they
clawed through the wreckage was
what had been left behind by the
children: pieces of clothing, shred-
ded books, a small crumpled shoe,
a crushed toy, a stilled mobile. Most
horrifying, however, was the almost
unspeakable human evidence of the
powerful evil that had descended
upon this place: a baby’s arm, a bat-
tered torso, a chubby finger.
One of the first into the building was
Det. Sgt. Don Hull of the Oklahoma
City Police Department. He and fel-
low officers crawled through mazes
of twisted rebar and shifting concrete
slabs. The air was so thick with dust
that rescuers—many of them, like Hull,
dressed in business suits and with no
special equipment—were forced to
take breaths as shallow as possible.
Early on, Hull saw a baby in the rub-
ble he thought to be dead. A massive
gash marked the side of its face, but
there was no blood, and no movement.
The baby’s arm was twisted around so
grotesquely—nearly wrung off—that
bone protruded from the biceps.94 april 2020
Reader’s Digest