Who Killed Terry Yeakey?

In 1996, when I was in sixth grade, we had a DARE officer come in every week (at least I think it was once a week). DARE is an anti-drug program, so this basically meant a police officer came in every week to tell us how drugs are bad. This is, of course, an issue that every sixth-grader considers lame and has probably already made up their minds on, so the DARE program is a waste of time and money if you ask me. But that didn't matter -- our DARE officer, a man named Terry Yeakey, was a cool guy. He seemed larger than life in more ways than one. He managed to keep a group of bored sixth-graders engaged. (One particularly memorable moment was how he taught us how to pronounce his name. He had us all shout "YAAAAAY-KEY!" in unison, which, he explained, was to trick everybody in the hall or nearby classes into thinking we were having fun.) I think everybody looked forward to seeing him, even if they didn't care about his message, because he was just plain fun to be around. He'd regale us with amusing stories, and he was lively and energetic. Everybody loved him.

What I didn't know at the time was he was also a hero.

You probably know that the federal building in my town, Oklahoma City, was bombed on April 19th, 1995. (I was in school, several miles away, when it happened. It shook our school building.) Minutes later, Yeakey was on the scene, trying to rescue as many people as he could, working day and night to pull people out of the rubble. One of the only pictures of him on Google Images is a picture of him at the scene, clearly distressed or exhausted, but not giving up.

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While he was at it, he tried to figure out what the hell had happened, and he noticed that there were glaring discrepancies between how the bombing went down and how it was being reported in the media. Discrepancies that appeared not to be mistakes, but a deliberate cover-up. He found something in particular -- nobody seems to know what -- which he intended to go back and photograph the next day, but when he tried to, that area was sectioned off and they wouldn't let him in. Even though he was a police officer!

Fast forward back to 1996. One day I walked into school and noticed something was amiss. Everybody seemed kinda down. I asked someone what happened.

"Sergeant Yeakey is dead."

Wh... what. Yeakey? Dead? What happened?

"He committed suicide."

Bull. Shit.

The Yeakey I knew? The big teddy bear? The always happy, friendly, fun guy? No way. That's impossible.

I realize sometimes people can put on a facade and fool everyone, even their family, into thinking everything's OK when really it isn't. But I think Yeakey was murdered. From what I understand, the police never investigated the matter very much.

I could go on, but there are other articles that discuss the evidence already. A lot of it makes me uncomfortable because it kinda gets into "crazy conspiracy theory" territory, but... why else would someone want Yeakey dead? There's a lot of other weirdness about the bombing too. Who knows, maybe somebody in the FBI was in on the OKC bombing the whole time... not the FBI as a whole, that'd be ridiculous, but some guy acting on his own...

It makes my blood boil, though, that something like this could happen. That it takes just one powerful guy in the right place to stop a police investigation and dismiss a murder as a suicide...

I just heard while I was writing this post that the story of Terry Yeakey is being made into a film... hopefully this will inspire somebody to uncover the truth one day...