BRANCH DAVIDIAN HISTORY 3/7/11

After we left Lake Whitney Preserve we headed south to Waco, TX.  Back in 1993 Ann and I remembered being spellbound for 50+ days as a splinter group of the Seventh Day Adventists that lived somewhat of a communal life under the leadership of David Koresh were in a standoff with the FBI.  It ended violently in a gunfight and the compound being burned to the ground.  Several FBI agents were killed in the eventual assault and 80+ members of the religious group were killed.
We decided, seeing as how we were in the area, we would try to find the place.  With a little internet work we found the location and drove out to it.

 

Not only is the location still there, but we found a memorial and the Branch Davidians still have a place there with a church and many buildings.We were surprised at how our memory of the place from all the news we watched on the incident was still in tact and how familiar it all looked!

The memorial was simple, but it told the story from the Davidian's perspective as opposed to the news we were in memory of.

We will never know, ourselves who was in the right and who was in the wrong, but in fairness to the Seventh Day Adventists, this splinter group and their members were excommunicated from the SDA when they first broke off from the church years ago and are not affiliated with the church, though they claim similar spiritual linage.

The bottom dollar to us is that this place is a piece of our history that we remembered from our younger years.  Granted, a tragedy that could have been prevented if the sect would have been obedient to following the laws of the land.  But, their end was a fulfillment of their apocalyptic beliefs.