Waco Coroner Has Concerns
As an independent probe prepares to look into the government's role in the 1993 Branch Davidian standoff, a medical examiner says he'd like to look again into the deaths of sect members who died from gunshot wounds.
"There is a feeling that one should go back and reevaluate," said Dr. Nizam Peerwani, the Tarrant County medical examiner. "The focus at the time was not whether the FBI was doing the shooting."
About 80 people died after a fire ravaged the group's compound 10 miles east of Waco.
Peerwani said he wants to reexamine the deaths of 23 Davidians who died of bullet wounds. It may be possible to determine whether they were shot by someone outside the compound building, he told the Waco Tribune-Herald for today's editions.
Did the bullets go through an "intermediary target, like a wall or door, before striking these people?" he asked.
A Justice Department spokesman declined comment on Peerwani's statements.
Justice of the Peace David Pareya, one of four McLennan County justices who ordered the initial autopsies, told the newspaper he has lingering questions about some of the deaths.
Pareya said he had no choice but to rule the cause of death for many Davidians as unknown because the FBI would not supply him with the results of the ballistics tests.
"The thing that always stayed in my mind was if they were afraid some of the ordnance or ballistics could be matched up with their weaponry," Pareya said.
Meanwhile, Justice Department officials acknowledged that an FBI document the agency had failed to turn over to Congress will become a key part of Republican Sen. John Danforth's independent inquiry into the standoff.
The key final page from a 49-page FBI lab report was turned over to the House Government Reform Committee this week, along with an internal Justice Department memo acknowledging the document "was not produced to Congress" during the 1995 investigations into the tragedy.
Justice spokesman Myron Marlin noted, however, that the page was properly turned over to lawyers in criminal and civil cases involving Waco survivors.
"Whether it was an administrative error is something that the special counsel will have to look at," Marlin said. "But we know that the plaintiff and defendants counsel received it."
The first 48 pages of the lab report, dated Dec. 6, 1993, had been turned over to lawmakers years ago, absent the mention of the military-style tear gas that government officials for years had denied using.
The 49th page discloses that FBI investigators who examined the scene at Waco found a "fired US military 40mm shell casing which originally contained a CS gas round," and two "expended 40mm tear gas projectiles."
The report is likely to become a key piece of evidence in the independent inquiry ordered by Attorney General Janet Reno and separate congressional investigatins into whether government officials tried to cover up the use of potentially incendiary tear gas on the final day of the siege.
Justice Department and FBI officials denied for years that flammable tear gas grenades were used on April 19, 1993, the day the Davidian compound went up in flames. They abruptly reversed course earlier this month and acknowledged a "very limited number" of such devices were fired hours before the fatal fire.
The government continues to maintain that religious sect members set the fire, and federal agents did not contribute to it. They have said the tear gas canisters bounced off a roof of a concrete bunker and into a field. Sect leader David Koresh and some 80 followers perished during a later blaze in a wooden structure away from the bunker.