Blood had already been spilled on the farm in Waco, Texas, where Davidian cult followers were surrounded by federal agents, when Dick DeGuerin received a phone call.
It’s March 1993, and the mother of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh tells him that her son needs a lawyer. She recruits him.
Now 82, the Texas lawyer remains convinced that the siege of Mount Carmel, the residence where followers of the sect will remain entrenched for 51 days, could have been completed without the death of more than 80 people.
The Waco tragedy continues to fascinate in a deeply divided country, some seeing in it the symbol of what they consider to be the abuse of power by the federal state.
A monument erected on the scene of the tragedy attracts hundreds of visitors each month.
The Branch Davidians grew out of a 1959 split from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and David Koresh became its charismatic leader in the 1980s.
In 1993, accusing his followers of amassing illegal weaponry, federal agents obtained an arrest warrant for David Koresh and a search warrant for the Mount Carmel compound. Accusations of sexual abuse of minors also circulate around the sect.
The sect having refused federal agents access to the complex, they launched a first assault on February 28, but encountered armed resistance from the Branch Davidians. Four federal agents and five followers of the sect are killed. Then begins a long siege.
At the end of March, before entering the Mont Carmel complex, Dick DeGuerin thought he had reached an agreement with the Texas Rangers, responsible for the security of the premises, to obtain the surrender of David Koresh.
FBI agents take him up to 100 meters from the compound, in an armored vehicle.
The lawyer does not know what to expect. But he finds himself face to face with David Koresh, 33, intelligent and speaking with logic. He finds that he has been shot in the chest and wrist.
The leader of the sect is “very angry” with the siege of the federal authorities, he recalls.
He then considers it his duty to get David Koresh out of the complex to present him to justice, so that there is “no other death”.
“I told him, of course, that the law was the law, and that he had to obey the law even if it was contrary to his religious beliefs. He understood that,” he said.
However, negotiations stall and Dick DeGuerin returns to Mount Carmel with another lawyer from Houston, Jack Zimmermann, who represents another follower of the sect.
Some of the federal agents are starting to lose patience.
“There were the negotiators who wanted to reach a peaceful settlement, but there were also the intervention units who wanted to rush in, kill everyone and arrest him,” recalls the lawyer. “The intervention units won”.
Seeing the final assault approaching, Dick DeGuerin says he tried to enter the compound one last time to convince David Koresh to surrender, but that he was prevented from doing so.
“An FBI agent told me: We don’t need you anymore”.
On April 19, 1993, FBI agents stormed the compound in armored vehicles. They use flammable military gases near the building where men, women and children are entrenched.
Soon after, the farmhouse caught fire and 76 Davidians were killed, including 28 children.
Several investigations exonerated the federal police, concluding that the followers of the sect had perished by setting fire to the buildings themselves, and committing suicide by shooting themselves in the head or by killing each other.
But Waco has become a rallying cry for Americans who accuse the federal government of abuse of power, and paramilitary groups have taken inspiration from it.
In 1995, two years to the day after the massacre, Timothy McVeigh, who had followed the siege of Waco very closely, detonated a truck bomb in front of federal offices in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
For Dick DeGuerin, the lessons to be learned from Waco are clear.
Federal agents were convinced that David Koresh “didn’t care about them, again” and that he would not turn himself in, he said.
“They didn’t wait. I think if they had, it would have ended peacefully.”
04/18/2023 14:14:28 – Waco (United States) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
