On April 17, 1995, the day after Easter, Bud Welch’s 23-year-old daughter Julie Marie came to visit her father at the Oklahoma City man’s Texaco station.

She spent two hours, and when she left, she hugged him hard.

That hug was the last touch the father had from his daughter, who died two days later in the Murrah Federal Building bombing.

As fate would have it, Julie Marie had left her office shortly before 9 a.m. that morning and walked to the front of the first floor office building to pick up a client and the man who had accompanied him.

Julie Marie, a Spanish interpreter for the Social Security Administration, and the two men were walking back to her office, when, as they got to the middle of the building, a massive explosion leveled its front half.

Welch felt the blast at his house eight miles northwest of the downtown building.

In a few seconds, Julie Marie would have been back in her work area, where no one was killed. Instead she, her client and his companion were killed that day, along with 165 others in what was at that time the most deadly act of terrorism in the United States.

Timothy McVeigh, a decorated Gulf War veteran who had developed anti-government leanings, was arrested shortly after the bombing, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. He died by lethal injection in 2001.

A week before the 12th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Welch is in Lincoln to speak against the death penalty and support an amendment that would substantially change the state’s policy on which convicted murderers are condemned to death. The Legislature is to take up the bill today.

Welch admits that after McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols were arrested, he was full of revenge and anger.

“I simply wanted them fried,” he said.

After a month, he began to struggle with his feelings about the death penalty. Between that struggle and his grief, he couldn’t sleep unless he drank. His smoking increased to four packs a day. He visited the bomb site daily.

Ten months after his daughter’s death, he began to realize that killing McVeigh and Nichols would not help him to heal.

Several years later, he had an opportunity to visit Bill McVeigh and his daughter and talk to them about Timothy. As he left their house that day, after pledging to do what he could to prevent Timothy McVeigh’s death, he said a weight lifted from him.

“I found a victim bigger than myself,” he said. “We both buried children. We did it in different ways, but we both buried children. … And when your children die, you bury them in your heart and (the pain) never goes away.”

About a year before the execution, he said, he forgave McVeigh.

Julie Marie had once remarked to her dad after hearing a news report on the radio about a Texas execution that it made her sick. The state was teaching hate, she said, and it had no socially redeeming value.

“That echoes in my mind every day since her death,” he said.

From victims’ families, the most common response he has heard — three, five, 10 years after a killer was put to death — is that the execution did not do for them what they thought it would.

Six months after the Oklahoma City bombing, 85 percent of victims’ families wanted McVeigh to die, Welch said. Six years after, only half wanted that. Now, most who supported execution believe it was a mistake, he said.

In Nebraska, at least two family members of Samuel Sun, a victim of the Norfolk bank shootings four years ago, still support the death penalty for three convicted in those killings.

Bill and Ben Sun testified March 30 at the hearing on LB377, asking senators to do nothing to interfere with the death sentences of their father’s killer, Jose Sandoval. Ben Sun said he could not find closure or feel peace while Sandoval is sitting in prison.

But Welch said the act of taking another human out of a cage and killing him does not produce a good feeling.

Prosecutors “need to look (family members) in the eyes and tell them the truth, that killing another human being is not part of the healing process,” he said. “I know. I’ve been there.”

Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.