Apr 14, 2018 3 min read

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land.” People have jokingly attributed to it, including the paying of our federal income taxes, but April has been much crueler from a horrific-crime standpoint.

On April 19, 1995, near a federal building in Oklahoma City, Okla., Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols detonated a truck bomb containing 13 barrels of ammonium nitrate and liquid nitromethane, killing 168 people and injuring 682. McVie was later stopped by police for driving without a license plate, and evidence quickly linked him and Nichols to the explosion. It was the deadliest domestic terrorist attack until the 9/11 attacks, and it was purposely carried out on the two-year anniversary of another deadly incident, the FBI raid on the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, Texas, in which a fire that engulfed the Branch Davidian headquarters killed 76 people.

On April 20, 1999, in Columbine, Colo., two high school seniors, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, entered Columbine High School with sawed-off shotguns and a semi-automatic handgun and murdered 12 students and one teacher, while wounding 21 others before committing suicide. The later discovery of journals both students kept revealed that they were inspired by Timothy McVeigh. At the time it was the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history.

The deadliest shooting by a student on a college campus in U.S. history also occurred the same week of April. On April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va., Seung-Hui Cho, a senior with a history of mental trouble, killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in two attacks. Two years earlier Cho had been accused of stalking two female students, leading to an investigation in which Cho was declared mentally ill and ordered to undergo medical treatment, but because he was never institutionalized his gun purchases were legal. Cho also committed suicide before he could be apprehended.

And finally, on April 15, 2013, two brothers of Chechen descent, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, detonated two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring several hundred, 16 of whom lost a limb. After a manhunt in which the Tsarnaev brothers killed two police officers and wounded one, Tamerlan himself was killed (after his brother either inadvertently or purposely ran him over). Dzhokar was later discovered hiding in a boat in Watertown, Mass., and arrested. In 2015, Dzhokar was sentenced to death and is now on death row in a prison in Colorado.

Five horrible incidents in one cruel month. “The Waste Land” is a very long poem with five parts, one of which is titled “The Burial of the Dead.”

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.