Survivors and victims’ families came together this morning (Sunday, April 19, 2020) to pay virtual tribute to the lives lost and lives altered 25 years ago on April 19, 1995, when a truck bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Coronavirus restrictions forced the cancelation of the 25th-anniversary ceremony at the site of the tragedy. Instead, the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum aired an hour-long pre-recorded video that included the reading of the names of the 168 victims. Among those killed by the massive truck bomb that sheared off the building’s front half were 19 children, most of whom were in a daycare center in the basement.

The commemoration also featured 168 seconds of silence.

“On this day 25 years ago, our people experience a senseless attack that shook our state and nation to its very core,” Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt told viewers.

“No words or measure of time can fully heal the scars rooted in that day, but we will and we must never forget the wisdom we gained and the lesson we learned,” he said.

Law enforcement initially suspected foreign terrorists: The attack happened about two years after Islamic terrorists detonated a truck bomb inside a parking garage at the World Trade Center in New York.

But prosecutors would soon learn the Oklahoma City attackers were U.S. citizens and that their bombing was inspired by a different 1993 event.

Hatred of the federal government motivated former Army soldier Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, to commit what many experts still refer to as the deadliest act of domestic terrorism on U.S. soil. McVeigh was ultimately convicted, sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection in 2001. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison.

The day McVeigh selected, April 19, was exactly two years after federal agents raided the compound of the Branch Davidian religious sect near Waco, Texas. At least 76 people, including about two dozen teens and children, died on the day of the raid, mostly from a fire that swept through the compound.

McVeigh had visited the compound during the 51-day standoff that preceded the raid, and prosecutors say that fueled his anger toward the federal government, culminating in the Oklahoma City attack. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which conducted the initial raid of the Waco compound, had offices inside the Murrah building.