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“And what happened at Ruby Ridge,� Brian Blansett told me.

Those events are tied together by Timothy McVeigh, and as we continue our series this week as the 30th anniversary of the bombing nears, I wanted to offer Tulsa World readers a chance for the first time to read the definitive series on what happened in Waco leading up to the fatal fire on April 19, 1993.

At the time, Blansett was the city editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald, supervising the coverage of the siege in addition to being an eyewitness. A member of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, he is still hard at work in the state as the publisher of the Lincoln County News in Chandler.

One of the things we have tried to keep in mind this week is not everyone was around in the 1990s to know the history. This week I talked to some college students who grew up in Oklahoma City. They shared that the Oklahoma City bombing was hardly a day’s discussion in their high school history classes.

In 1992, federal agents went to a remote cabin in northern Idaho after Randy Weaver, who was there with his family, failed to show up in court on illegal weapons charges. During the Ruby Ridge standoff, Weaver’s wife and son, as well as a U.S. marshal, were killed.

In February 1993, the Waco Tribune-Herald newspaper started an in-depth series called The Sinful Messiah about the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, in Waco. The series was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize “for stories that revealed sexual abuse and other criminal acts within the local compound held by members of the Branch Davidian cult.�

As Blansett tells the story, the Davidians had lived in and around Waco for decades. He called them a “benign, if bizarre� group until the late 1980s, when a young man named Vernon Howell took over. He soon changed his name to David Koresh and took advantage of the true believers, including the young girls on the compound.

The newspaper series started a day before the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was planning to raid the place — six months after Ruby Ridge put the agency in the spotlight.

The first gun battle resulted in the deaths of four ATF agents and six Davidians. After a 51-day siege, 76 Davidians died on April 19 after a fire was started in the compound.

As the world watched during those 51 days, members of the public started arriving in Waco to see the siege for themselves. One of the people on a distant hill watching the compound was 24-year-old Timothy McVeigh.

He was selling pro-gun and anti-government bumper stickers on the hood of his car. One of them read “Fear the government that fears your gun.� Another said “Ban guns. Make the street safe for a government takeover.�

He was interviewed by TV reporters.

Two years later on April 19, McVeigh drove up to the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in a truck loaded with a bomb. It was his response to what the government did in Waco and Ruby Ridge, he later said.

“One was the cause, and the other was the reaction,� Blansett told me. “The ATF could have arrested Koresh pretty much whenever they wanted. There was no need for a military-style attack.�

One of the reasons McVeigh targeted Oklahoma City and the Murrah Building was its ATF office.

“It’s really sad. None of those things had to happen,� Blansett said of events at Ruby Ridge, Waco and Oklahoma City. “Koresh needed to be in jail, but no one needed to die in order for him to get there. It’s a great tragedy.�