Branch Davidians

The Branch Davidians trace their origins to a 1930s schism within the Seventh-day Adventist tradition, from which a series of groups developed distinctive teachings about biblical prophecy and the imminent end of the age. The group is known to the wider public almost entirely through the events of 1993 at their settlement, Mount Carmel, near Waco, Texas, then led by David Koresh (born Vernon Howell), who taught a prophetic interpretation of the Book of Revelation centered on the opening of the seven seals.

In February 1993 a US federal agency (the ATF) attempted to execute search and arrest warrants relating to firearms; the raid ended in a gun battle that killed four agents and six group members, and began a 51-day siege by federal authorities. On 19 April 1993 a final assault using tear gas was followed by a fire that swept the buildings; some 76 people inside died, including Koresh and many children. The causes of the fire and the conduct of the operation were the subject of intense and lasting controversy and multiple official inquiries, and the events at Waco became a defining reference point in American debates over religious freedom, the treatment of unconventional groups, and government use of force. Small communities in the Davidian tradition continue.

The fire that ended the fifty one day siege near Waco on 19 April 1993 killed seventy six people inside the building, including more than twenty children, after four federal agents and six Branch Davidians had died in the initial raid on 28 February. The argument over responsibility has continued ever since, and it has had two separate afterlives.

The official one ran through inquiry. Congressional hearings in 1995 were followed by the investigation led by the former senator John Danforth, whose report in 2000 concluded that federal agents did not start the fire and did not fire shots on the final day, while criticising the government's failure to disclose its use of pyrotechnic tear gas rounds earlier that morning. The tactical lessons were absorbed into federal doctrine on barricade situations, where the standing assumption is no longer that pressure applied over time produces surrender.

The scholarly afterlife is the reason the case matters to an atlas of belief. James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher argued in Why Waco? that the decisive failure was interpretive rather than tactical: negotiators treated David Koresh's biblical language as a delaying device rather than as the thing he was actually saying, and did not take seriously his eventual offer to come out once he had finished a written commentary on the seven seals. Their case, that reading a group's theology accurately is an operational requirement and not a courtesy, is now the standard reference point in the field.

The date acquired a second meaning when Timothy McVeigh chose the second anniversary for the Oklahoma City bombing.

This record documents two distinct episodes involving the Branch Davidians, a group that grew out of a schism within the Seventh day Adventist tradition, each examined by a different authority and reaching a different kind of finding.

The first is the 1993 siege near Waco, Texas. On 28 February 1993 agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives attempted to serve search and arrest warrants at the group's Mount Carmel settlement; the attempt ended in a gun battle that killed four agents and six Branch Davidians and began a fifty one day siege. On 19 April 1993 a final assault using tear gas was followed by a fire that killed roughly seventy six people inside, including leader David Koresh and more than twenty children. Congressional hearings followed in 1995, and a federal investigation led by former senator John Danforth concluded in 2000 that government agents did not start the fire and did not fire shots that day, while criticizing officials for not disclosing their earlier use of pyrotechnic tear gas rounds.

The second is a separate matter examined a year earlier by a different body entirely. In February 1992, responding to a complaint from David Jewell, the father of a young member, Texas Child Protective Services caseworker Joyce Sparks visited Mount Carmel, interviewed Koresh and the children living there, and closed the case for lack of evidence. After the 1993 raid, Texas officials said none of the twenty one children released during the standoff had confirmed the abuse allegations either. The child welfare inquiry and the federal law enforcement operation that followed involved different agencies, different conduct, and reached separate, unconnected conclusions.