Fund helps educate victims' children

By Ann Defrange

Published: April 17, 2005

Casey Heald is the youngest of five children of Ruth Heald. Their mother lost an eye in the bombing and cannot work. Last fall, Casey Heald enrolled at Oklahoma State University. Casey Heald was 8 years old when his mother's workplace was bombed and his family was changed forever.

Ruth Heald, in 1995 a 46-year-old employee of the Housing and Urban Development office on the eighth floor of the Murrah Building, lost one eye in the explosion and has been unable to work since. The outlook for her five children, Casey said, might have have been junior college and associate degrees and student loans.

But community leaders, in the months after the bombing, established scholarship funds for the children of Murrah victims. Donations arrived from all over the world, until millions of dollars were collected.

One Heald daughter, Sarah, is a senior at Tulsa University. Other siblings have used some of the scholarship money. Last fall, Casey, the youngest, enrolled at Oklahoma State University.

"I'm working on a 3.0 or better" this semester, he said. Yet, for a time after April 1995, he was lost.

He didn't want to go to school at all. One teacher reached out to the boy, became a mentor and a friend.

He wants to stay in Oklahoma and teach. He is majoring in secondary education; he hopes to become a history and geography teacher.

Many recipients, many choices
Cathy Nestlen of the Oklahoma City Community Foundation, which became administrator for the funds, said the scholarships have been spent in Ivy League colleges and vocational training schools.

"Mom would have struggled to put me through college," said Dina Abulon, whose stepfather was killed. Abulon moved to Oklahoma when Peter Avillanoza was transferred from Hawaii to the Oklahoma City HUD office. The 56-year-old fair housing director and Dina's mother blended their families to include nine children.

Dina is the youngest of her mother's children. Two of her brothers currently attend Washington University and a California technical school. She is earning an advanced degree in mechanical engineering at San Diego.

"Even though it was tragic, it's something he would have wanted for me," she said of her stepfather.

Anna-Faye Rose has been Survivors' Education Fund coordinator at the Oklahoma City Community Foundation since November 1995.

"We are working hard to ensure that the opportunity for college so generously provided by so many Americans is used to help each child reach his or her maximum potential," she said. Nestlen said the OCCF has carefully calculated to be certain funds are adequate as long as the children need them.

Dina Abulon's mother and many of Peter Avillanoza's children will be in Oklahoma for the 10th anniversary of the bombing. It will be the first commemoration for which Abulon has returned.

"I just wanted to come back and thank the community," she said, "for everything."