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In the decades that have followed, he has never really stopped. Jamar had ordered him to help oversee the crime scene and to handle media inquiries, and he spent much of his time trying to explain to reporters how everything had gone so catastrophically wrong. “It gave me that extra surge to get back in my FBI mode and start taking care of business, because who else is going to do it?” he recalls.įor the next two and a half weeks, Sage stayed in Waco. to drive back home to their boys, in Round Rock, and Sage roused himself for the work that still needed to be done. “I’m not a cuddler, but I needed it.” He didn’t speak a word the entire night. “I flopped back onto the bed and she crawled into the sack with me and just held me until I fell asleep,” Sage says. “By turning that switch off, it was like I had fifty-one other guys that were looking over my shoulder, watching me say, ‘We failed.’ ” How can I resolve this without pushing them over the rail?’ ” Instead, he found his wife, Sheryl, standing in the entryway. “I thought, ‘I’m going to kill these people. He figured it was reporters asking for comment, and he walked across the room, shirtless and fuming. A couple of hours later, he woke up to a knock at the door. That night, Sage drove back to his motel in Waco, took a scalding-hot shower, and crashed into bed. “I was emotionally, physically, psychologically just devastated. Sage didn’t yet know all these details, but he understood the enormity of what had just happened. One three-year-old boy had been stabbed in the chest. Autopsies would reveal that at least 20 of them, including Koresh, had either shot themselves or been shot by other members of the sect, likely as a way to avoid a fiery death. Some appeared to have died from blunt force trauma caused by the collapsing building. Many of them had perished from thermal burns and smoke inhalation. Though 9 Branch Davidians had left the building during the fire, Koresh and 75 of his followers had remained inside to the end. But when the HRT members emerged, they were alone. He’d seen members of the FBI’s elite tactical unit, the Hostage Rescue Team, descend into an underground bunker where agents hoped some in the group might have taken their children. “I went from orders to requests to, ultimately, as the fire spread, pleas,” he says.Īfter switching off the PA, Sage staggered across the road and walked toward the compound. Instead, shortly after noon, flames began to shoot out of the building.
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Sage kept hoping to see the members of the group filing out toward the road. Over the next few hours, he stood inside a small house that the FBI had dubbed Sierra One Alpha, just across the road from Mount Carmel, as tanklike combat engineering vehicles doused the Davidians with tear gas. Sage had begun the morning by instructing Koresh and his followers to exit their building, but no one inside had budged. On that final day, when the FBI’s on-scene commander, Jeff Jamar, picked a negotiator to tell the members of the sect that they had to surrender, Sage was the obvious choice. Ever since, he’d been the lead negotiator, speaking frequently with Koresh and his deputy, Steve Schneider, cajoling them to cooperate when he could, arguing with them when he felt that he had to, making demands when it seemed nothing else would work. Nearly two months earlier, Sage had been the first FBI negotiator to arrive on the scene after a disastrous Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raid left four federal agents and six Branch Davidians dead.