Woodburn Bank Bombing I

Tucked into the SW corner of Marion County, OR, at a point where the Santiam and Willamette Rivers merge, in an area as far removed from the pace of 21st century life as any you could imagine, on a 750-acre farm and in an area that had been at the center of the extended Turnidge family's life for generations, a plot is alleged to have been hatched--a plot that led to the death of two people and the dismemberment of a third. That plot included the manufacture of an explosive device, with the most up-to-date and "safe" technology, and a relatively elaborate scheme to use the device for a yet-undisclosed purpose, but nevertheless a purpose which went terrible awry at the West Coast branch bank in Woodburn, OR on Friday, December 12. Woodburn itself is a sort of sleepy mid-Willamette Valley town, and like Caesar's Gaul is neatly divided into three groups: the Old Believer Russians, the relatively new Hispanic arrivals, and the Anglos. On that day in Woodburn, though, things were anything but sleepy.

The Men

At the center of this drama and crime are two men, Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, their names giving away the generations in which they were born. Bruce, very much of a "baby boomer" name, was born in 1951 and his son Joshua, whose namesake "'fit' the battle of Jericho," came into the world 25 years later. Bruce grew up either on or near the farm where he and his wife now live, though as tenants, at the end of South Potts Road (# 13493) in rural Jefferson, OR. If you cross the meandering Santiam River to the South of the property, you are shortly in Linn County, and if you proceed about 1/2 mile East of that crossing point you come to the most northern road in Linn County, named Turnidge Road NE. Objects are given names in American life principally for three reasons: because a donor has given millions of dollars for something, because someone has done something of a positive nature to be noted, or because people have settled in a place and have just not moved. My sense is that Turnidge Road NE wasn't so named because of the first alternative.

Bruce Turnidge, like most baby boomers, grew up in a large family, with at least two brothers. Ah, the 1950s and early 1960s. Idyllic times, weren't they? At least that is what we have been taught to believe. Yet, the values, fears and longings of that era were burned into the souls of those who currently "run" the world, and so the financial, relational and other phobias and failings of that (my) generation would no doubt have also descended upon the Turnidge clan simply because the air that they breathed at the time contained the noxious fumes of my generation. No mask of religion, "family values," or economic prosperity could quite escape the spiritually phosgenic character of that gas. In the Turnidge's case the disruption that came was primarily economic. While the late 1960s saw the Summer of Love and the revolution of consciousness, for Bruce Turnidge's family it saw the numbing, debilitating and often immobilizing pain of economic loss. The Farm, which we will call it, was lost. Bruce was in his late teens. If, as the Christian theological tradition has properly interpreted Zechariah's suggestive principle--"Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter"--to refer to the way the disciples abandoned Jesus at his death, so the principle seems also to have life in this instance. The farm was dissolved as a family economic entity, and the boys were scattered.

Why do siblings respond to the same insult in dramatically different ways? Why is it that someone, in the face of this kind of upset, might resolve to get an education, repair the damage, and make something of his life while another might be so consumed with unsorted emotions that his life, as it were, dies aborning? Why can the most beautiful flower press through the seeming cold, impenetrable pavement, while another flower, of equal beauty, never flourish except in the most nurturingly-friendly environments? Psychologists go on TV to answer these kinds of questions, but no answers really are forthcoming because, as Hawthorne might say, the answers are buried too deeply in the mysterious recesses of the human heart. An excavating company far more skillful than the one Bruce Turnidge had operated over the years, might be required to get to the bottom of this one.

Fast Forward--To Today

Well, as one teacher I once had, the most famous teacher I ever had, said, in describing the history of the Jewish people--"they had babies, they went to war, they had more babies, they went to war again, and finally something happened." So it was in this case. Though details about Bruce's and Joshua's life will no doubt be forthcoming at trial, and especially in the sentencing phase of the capital trial, where the defense puts on whatever kind of mitigation evidence it thinks will convince the jury to impose less than a sentence of death, let's fast forward to the events of the last week.

When we move the camera to today, we find Bruce and his wife Janet living still on the 750-acre farm at the end of South Potts Road. Bruce has a shop, where he has all kinds of equipment that only men handle. He has a struggling company that has something to do with supplying oil barrels for businesses. Joshua, his son, has recently (like two weeks ago), moved into a home with his girlfriend, Jamie Lewis, in NE Salem. Joshua had attended the "family" high school for a few years, the Salem (Christian) Academy, in the early 1990s. I say it was the "family" school because the reports are that someone in the Turnidge clan, 60 years ago, helped found this school. The web-site of the Academy gives only the barest sketch of its history, telling us that three Mennonite Churches collaborated with a West Salem Bible Church in the early 1940s to found the Salem College and Academy. Apparently the peace-loving traditions of those brave 16th century counterculturalists didn't sink terribly deeply into every one of the Turnidge's hearts.

We will pick up the thread of the story, following primarily the "Marion County Probable Cause Statement and Data Sheet," but extrapolating from it and asking questions that seem not to be answered by that document. The next essay will do that.

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