Retired Tulsa Detective Helped Identify OKC Bombing Victims 25 Years Ago

Retired Tulsa homicide detective Roy Heim worked in the medical examiner's office in April 1995. He helped identify the remains of the 168 victims of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Thirty minutes after the bomb blew a hole in the side of the Murrah Building, Heim got a call that still gets to him today.

"About 9:30 a.m., my phone rang. It was the ME's office," Heim said.

Heim is part of a national team called DMORT, Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. They go to scenes of mass casualties to identify the bodies and reunite those victims with their families. The team is made up of funeral directors, medical examiners, forensic specialists, as well as experts in fingerprint, dental and DNA comparison.

"Sometimes you may get an ID on half a body or an arm," said Roy. "You do the very best you can do."

After the bombing, the team didn't know how they were going to identify the children in order to return them to their parents for burial, so Roy had the idea to go to the victim's homes and process them like a crime scene. They worked to get the children's fingerprints from toys or dressers so they could compare those prints to the bodies in the morgue.

At one home, the team couldn't find a single print of the little child, because friends had just come over to clean the house. Roy remembers they kept searching because it was so important. They ended up finding one little print way up high on the mirror, where the daddy had lifted the baby up to look in the mirror on the morning of April 19.

"It was a wonderful day," Heim said. "They came back and the fingerprint teams made identifications on most of the kids."

The bombing site was also a crime scene, so some people on the team were in charge of doing a full x-ray on every victim, looking for pieces of debris from the bomb. There were so many agencies working at the scene, but Roy remembers everyone worked so well together, without one cross word. Each team had a psychologist, whose job was to keep tabs on everyone's emotional well-being.

"Every once in a while, he'd tap somebody on the shoulder and say, 'See you in a couple of days.' Might've been a doctor, an officer, me," Heim said.

The funeral directors on the team were in charge of setting up a family center, where families could get information about their loved ones, receive counseling and get food and other services. Giving news to the families was the hardest part of the job for Heim.

"The hardest part was going to the church. I was emotional then, but you've got to put those things aside if you're going to do the job," he said.

The weeks after the bombing were incredibly grueling and emotionally draining work for Heim, but the bright spot was the Oklahoma Standard.

"We also saw an incredible response. You never asked for anything you didn't get. It was a bitter experience, but great experience too. To see people working together like we did and pulling together," Heim said.

One of the things Heim didn't expect was tabloid reporters and other people trying to sneak into the morgue.

The DMORT team has also responded to the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the Korean airliners crash, May tornadoes and flooding in Del Rio, Texas, to help identify victims.