WACO — Visitors still trickle through the gates at the New Mount Carmel Center, a nondescript patch of central Texas prairie.

Little is left of the Branch Davidians’ original compound, save for a rusted, twisted school bus buried underground, a water-filled pit and the footprints of two small outbuildings, visible in recently mown grass.

On the 25th anniversary since the religious compound became a fiery charnel house, the 77-acre plot east of Waco remains a symbol of the tragic consequences of both the violent defiance of authority and the overreach of government.

The 51-day siege remains among the most controversial operations in law enforcement history. Its effects were both immediate and longlasting, prompting lawsuits, hearings in Washington, an independent investigation, and pain and distrust that still reverberate.

Agents carry the memories of their fallen colleagues. Some surviving Branch Davidians continue to defend their dead leader. Fringe groups still spin conspiracy theories, debating who shot first. And the government treads much more carefully in similar standoffs.

For law enforcement unaccustomed to defiance, the catastrophe was a wake-up call to overhaul their operations. For the survivors and relatives of the 82 Davidians who died, including more than 20 children, it was a life-altering tragedy.

For others, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the fiery siege of the Branch Davidian compound on April 19, 1993 amounted to a declaration of war.

Looking for answers

On a sunny, dry, unremarkable Thursday, Peggy Clifford walked up to Mount Carmel’s memorial, shoes crunching in the gravel. She’d traveled to Central Texas from Little Rock, Arkansas to see her sister in nearby Lorena, and they’d planned this pilgrimage.

She was 28 years old in 1993, and watched the siege on national television. She saw the tanks smash into the compound, and the ensuing fires.

“It was a very sad day for America,” she said. “And I’m glad it’s still talked about, because what it does is helps us hopefully never make this mistake again.”

Back in 1993, dozens of Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventists, lived at Mount Carmel, a rambling compound 10 miles northeast of Waco. They believed a battle with “Babylon” would lead to their ascension to heaven.

Their leader, Vernon Howell, who changed his name to David Koresh, was born in Houston in 1959 to a single mother. He struggled with dyslexia, and endured a tumultuous childhood of abandonment and beatings. But he loved playing music and studying the Bible, memorizing long sections. He arrived at Mount Carmel in 1981, a wiry, spectacled 22-year-old with a yen for guns and cars. By 1990, after a violent clash with other Branch Davidians, he assumed leadership at the compound, where more than 100 members lived and studied Scripture.

Koresh, charismatic in his certainty, preached in long, detailed sermons. He forced celibacy on his male followers and claimed many of his female devotees as wives — some as young as 12 — and fathered more than a dozen children. If his followers saw divinity — or a rock star — in his wavy hair and scruffy beard, he didn’t mind. He preached he was “the Lamb,” a prophet who would unlock the “Seven Seals” and set in motion the end of time.

When Armageddon came, he made sure they’d be ready with hundreds of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

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David Thibodeau traveled to Mount Carmel after meeting Koresh in California. Then a 23-year-old musician looking for his break, he wasn’t particularly religious, but Koresh had a way of teaching the Bible Thibodeau had never experienced.

“I wasn’t with him because he was mesmerizing or a hypnotist,” said Thibodeau, now 48 and living in Maine. “I was with him because I saw reality through the Scriptures that I never knew existed, which became more and more powerful as time went on.”

The federal government, meanwhile, began investigating Koresh and the Davidians after learning the group was stockpiling weapons and illegally making machine guns and grenades.

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A failed raid

On Feb. 28, 1993, scores of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms piled into two cattle trailers and drove up Double E Ranch Road to execute a search warrant for illegal weaponry and to arrest a man former followers accused of sexual assault and child abuse.

Before the raid, ATF’s special response team had routinely handled high-pressure raids.

“We were running more warrants than anybody,” said ATF Special Agent Eric Evers, who participated in the raid and nearly died after being shot five times. “And I think that we got an air of, ‘nothing can go wrong.’”

Until Mount Carmel, none of the people they’d tangled with had ever sat in wait with machine guns, agents said.

Agents piled out of the trailers, fanning across the grounds. Roland Ballesteros, one of the Houston agents, ran toward the front of the compound, up the stairs to the main entrance. Koresh stood in the threshold and asked what was going on.

“Search warrant!” he yelled. Koresh smiled, stepped back and shut the door.

“The guy wasn't scared,” Ballesteros recalled.

Then Ballesteros heard the steady pop of bullets. He felt one hit his hand and saw part of his thumb dangling awkwardly and pulsing blood.

He dove to the side and pressed against the building’s wall, trying not to get shot again.

Charlie Short, then an ATF agent with the agency’s aviation division, was piloting a surveillance plane overhead.

“It looked like somebody had plugged in Christmas tree lights, because all the muzzle flashes started happening from the windows,” he said. “We were stunned … Agents were not equipped for what they were confronting.”

By the time the shooting stopped, Ballesteros and Evers were among more than a dozen injured agents. Four of their colleagues were dead. Six Davidians died that day as well.

“They had the high ground, and you know, we were completely reactionary,” Ballesteros said.

At the New Mount Carmel Center near Waco, flowers honor the victims of the standoff between Branch Davidians and federal agents 25 years ago. ( Yi-Chin Lee / Houston Chronicle ) At the New Mount Carmel Center near Waco, flowers honor the victims of the standoff between Branch Davidians and federal agents 25 years ago. ( Yi-Chin Lee / Houston Chronicle ) Photo: Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle Photo: Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Embers of Waco 1 / 11 Back to Gallery

A lengthy siege

The FBI assumed command of the operation.

Over the following weeks, hundreds of federal agents and police officers surrounded the complex with more than a dozen Bradley vehicles and tanks. They began negotiating with Koresh, hoping to convince him and his followers to come out. Media vans stretched for more than a mile down Elk Road.

In the frenzy after the initial raid, Koresh called into KRLD, a Dallas-area radio station.

“It was sort of Biblical-sounding gibberish,” recalled Charlie Seraphin, then the station’s manager.

After speaking to ATF officials, the station aired segments of a religious audio message from Koresh. Every time they played the message, Koresh sent out a few of his followers. Over the first five days he released 21 children.

Then the standoff entered a limbo that lasted nearly two months.

Seraphin watched, uneasy. The first time Koresh spoke to him, he talked like he was already dead.

‘All of us sort of feared what was going to happen,” Seraphin said. “But when it happened, it was very surreal.”

FBI negotiators tried to convince Koresh to surrender, though they frequently found themselves at odds with their peers within the hostage rescue team over how to bring an end to the siege. Negotiators wanted to talk; the rescue team agents were more active, using tanks to crush vehicles in front of the compound, playing loud music and flooding the area with bright lights at night to increase pressure on the Davidians.

Then, on a windy Monday morning, April 19, 1993, the Department of Justice ordered Koresh and his followers to surrender.

When they refused, the FBI began its assault about 6 a.m.

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Dick DeGuerin, Koresh’s attorney, was starting a trial in Denton when his wife called that morning and told him to turn on the television.

Tanks were punching holes through the looming compound’s walls. He called the FBI, begging them to stop.

“They said, ‘No, we don't need you anymore,’” he recalled.

The tanks flooded Mount Carmel with tear gas.

The Davidians donned gas masks they’d stockpiled, then spread hay and fuel and set fires throughout the compound. The prairie winds quickly whipped the flames into an inferno.

Autopsies would later show many of the followers had taken their own lives or been shot at close range. A 3-year-old boy was found stabbed fatally in the chest.

After the siege, federal prosecutors pursued murder and related charges against 11 surviving Branch Davidians. Four were acquitted of all charges; seven others were convicted of lesser offenses, with each serving less than 10 years in prison.

A left-handed blessing

Less than 12 miles from the rebuilt Mount Carmel Center is Waco’s pauper cemetery. The graves of more than 30 Davidians whom relatives did not claim lie there.

Clive Doyle, who was among the few Davidians to survive the fire and who was acquitted of all charges, recently returned to the site, where the land dips and rolls with the lines of graves.

Doyle, who still lives in Waco, lost his 18-year-old daughter, Shari, in the fire. He has never stopped believing Koresh’s teachings, and says he has a mission to tell the story of what happened.

“The world needs to learn to respect other peoples’ conviction,” he said. “The fact we were dedicated doesn’t mean we were brainwashed or naive.”

He still grapples to find meaning in the decades-old events.

“If David was just a preacher talking to his own congregation … nobody would ever have heard about him,” he said. “[Now], people come from all over the world because of what they heard or saw on TV or in the newspapers. … You might say, in a left- handed way, it was a blessing. He got to speak to more people … through this event than if he’d just preached every weekend in a church.”

Defenders of the Branch Davidians have yet to forgive.

“They took 100 agents and attacked a building that had 200 people in it — men, women and children,” said DeGuerin, who represented Koresh during the siege. “Just to serve an arrest and search warrant on David Koresh, when they could have arrested him in town, or on the roads when he ran … It was an effort by the ATF, a rogue agency, to exercise their authority.”

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A reckoning

The disaster prompted changes in the ATF, FBI and other agencies across the country.

Agents involved in the operation, now speak with a frank — if pained — candor, about missed warnings and needless deaths. They insist — backed by court testimony, and independent observers — that they didn’t fire the first shots in the Feb. 28 raid or start the fires that burned the Mount Carmel compound to the ground. But they wish things had gone differently.

“People like things to be black and white,” said Gary Noesner, a retired FBI agent who led negotiations during the first weeks of the siege.

“We seem to shun complexity and nuance,” he said. “I agree Koresh was ultimately responsible. However, that does not mean the government didn't make a lot of mistakes, because it did.”

Many agents agree that the raid should have been called off, particularly after their supervisors learned they’d lost the element of surprise.

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The Davidians had been warned before the raid that the ATF was on its way. Even after ATF supervisors discovered that, they decided to proceed anyway.

“We should've just put our feet down and said, ‘No, we were not going to go forward with this,’” said Bill Buford, a now-retired ATF agent who helped plan the raid. He was shot four times storming into Koresh’s bedroom before retreating.

Gary Orchowski, who retired as the Houston Field Division’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge last year, believes the agency had too much time and money invested to stop.

“The powers-that-be put dollars over lives,” Orchowski said recently. “It was all avoidable. But the bottom line is who is the biggest villain and who could have avoided all of it — David Koresh.”

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Agents had handled other big cases prior to the Mount Carmel raid. But nothing like the Branch Davidians.

“Waco was something different,” recalled Clinton Van Zandt, a retired FBI agent who negotiated with Koresh during the siege. “By the time negotiations even began, there were dead ATF agents, there were dead Branch Davidians … Everybody was kind of dug into their position.”

In the aftermath, the ATF - later renamed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - equipped special response team operators with M-4 carbines. The agency requires contingency plans for every raid and increased medical training. During operations, the on-site team leader now has the ultimate authority to launch or cancel an operation. And the FBI placed negotiators on equal footing with tactical operators.

The government has become more risk-averse, spending more time negotiating, as authorities did with the Montana Freemen in 1996 and with Cliven Bundy in 2014 in Nevada.

“That was the terrible lesson the FBI learned,” Van Zandt said. “Time is a friend of ours; time is not an enemy. And if we’re talking nobody’s dying.”

Painful reverberations

The reverberations of the Branch Davidian siege went far beyond government.

Robert Churchill, a history professor at the University of Hartford who has studied militia movements across the U.S., said the standoff had a significant impact on the growth of militias across the country.

Government skeptics were already concerned about what they viewed as law enforcement’s strong-arm tactics in cases like the FBI’s handling of an 11-day standoff in 1992 at Ruby Ridge in Idaho. Agents trying to arrest a man there shot and killed his wife and 14-year-old son. They were also worried about ATF agents storming into firearms dealers with guns drawn, demanding people to get on the ground as they looked for documents, Churchill said.

“They’d seen law enforcement’s military tactics during the War on Drugs, but that was in the inner city,” he said. “Now those tactics were being employed against gun owners, in the suburbs, in more rural areas, and people thought they were being targeted.”

In 1995, on the second anniversary of the end of the siege, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people — including 19 children — and wounding nearly 700 others, the worst incident of domestic terrorism in American history.

Law enforcement agents now remain vigilant every year on Feb. 28 and April 19.

‘A broken church’

Just inside the gate off Double E Ranch Road last month, a low winter sun reflected off a tranquil lake surrounded by still-bare trees. Wisps of clouds marbled the sky.

Charles Pace, 66, still lives at the Mount Carmel site, with his wife, Alexa.

Pace, who had fallen out with Koresh years before the raid because he believed his teachings were heretical, moved back onto the property in 1998.

He said Koresh’s death fulfilled an earlier prophecy by Seventh-Day Adventists, that a prophet would arrive and claim to be a god and lead his followers into apostasy.

“The fire was God’s way of purifying a broken church and the slaughter was God’s way of removing an apostate leadership teaching abominations,” he said.

He says he warned Koresh in 1984 that he was teaching heresy.

“The elders fell for him hook, line and sinker, and basically nobody challenged him,” Pace said.

In the years after the fire, Pace cleared away the rubble. In 1999, volunteers built a new church at the site. With a spate of recent documentaries, dozens of people visit each week, and more on weekends. They’re drawn by God, he believes.

“They come to find out what really happened,” he said. “They need closure as well.”

At the front of the property, a sign carved in burnished red rock proclaims, “Welcome to New Mount Carmel Center.”

Behind, two low walls of polished stones list the names of the dead. Shells, coins and pebbles run along the top, while fresh bouquets of pink and red carnations dot the base of the memorial.

A small plastic container sits there as well, filled with button-sized paper hearts. A mourner had scrawled on a note on a strip of tape across the lid.

“One heart for every heart.”

Eighty-six hearts.

St. John Barned-Smith joined the Houston Chronicle in 2014 and covers public safety and major disasters. His recent stories on flophouse fires prompted Houston to overhaul housing regulations. He was also part of a team named a Pulitzer finalist in 2017 for showing how Texas education officials used state policies to deny special education to tens of thousands of children. Follow him on Twitter or email him at st.john.smith@chron.com.

Timeline by St. John Barned-Smith

Design by Jordan Rubio

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