Mount Carmel: February 28 to April 19, 1993
Near Waco, Texas
Nine miles northeast of downtown Waco, on a flat stretch of land that looks like nothing in particular from the road, is the site of the Mount Carmel Center. What happened there in the spring of nineteen ninety-three changed American law enforcement, fueled domestic extremist movements, and produced more than three decades of unresolved argument about what the government did and why. The Branch Davidians were a religious sect led by David Koresh.
They had occupied the compound called Mount Carmel since the nineteen fifties, under various leaders. Koresh took control in the late nineteen eighties and had, by the early nineties, drawn the attention of federal investigators over allegations of illegal weapons modifications and the abuse of children in his care. On February twenty-eighth, nineteen ninety-three, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to execute a search warrant at Mount Carmel.
A gun battle broke out. Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians died in that initial confrontation. The FBI took over and a fifty-one-day standoff followed, ending on April nineteenth when agents inserted tear gas using armored vehicles.
Three fires broke out simultaneously in different parts of the compound. About seventy five Branch Davidians died in the fire, including children. The government has maintained that members of the sect started the fires deliberately.
Some survivors have disputed this. No single account of what caused the fires has been accepted by all parties, and federal investigations and civil litigation continued for years afterward. The date of the siege's end, April nineteenth, was cited two years later by Timothy McVeigh as a motivating factor in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Waco nineteen ninety-three became a reference point in American political culture in ways that the people living nine miles west in the actual city of Waco had little control over and did not ask for.
