- 5 months ago
The decade wasn't all Friends and Spice Girls... Join us as we revisit the most terrifying events that shook the world during the 1990s. From devastating natural disasters to shocking acts of terrorism and violence that forever changed our perception of safety, these moments stopped the world in its tracks and left lasting scars on our collective consciousness.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Now we have several live reports to bring you.
00:02First, John Rawlins is in East Mauritius, which is the on-ground headquarters for the search mission.
00:06That's only 10 miles from the crash. John, what's the latest there?
00:09Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at moments from 1990 to 1999 that made the world stand still.
00:17Jewel made a brief appearance outside his apartment last evening.
00:20On Wednesday, dozens of FBI and ATF agents were in Jewel's residence and carried off box after box of materials.
00:28Los Angeles riots.
00:29Now the story that might never have surfaced if someone hadn't picked up his home video camera.
00:33We've all seen the pictures of Los Angeles police officers beating a man they had just pulled over.
00:38The city's police chief said today he will support criminal charges against some of the men.
00:43Here's ABC's Gary Shepard.
00:44In the wee hours of the morning on March 3rd, 1991, motorist Rodney King was pulled over by police officers in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles for speeding.
00:53The responding officers, under the false impression that King was armed, beat him ferociously.
00:59Unbeknownst to them at the time, bystander George Holliday filmed the beating on his personal camcorder, and the resulting footage was widely publicized.
01:07I feel that it's a great travesty of justice.
01:10I feel that the jury in Simi Valley gave the okay to continue to abuse and oppress and suppress black people in this country.
01:19I feel that there is an undercurrent of racism and that the system is rotten to the core.
01:25Despite the overwhelming evidence against them, the four officers were acquitted of assault and three of excessive force.
01:31This, combined with growing unrest amongst black Americans, resulted in the calamitous LA riots, saw 63 deaths, over 2,000 injured, and a reported $1 billion in damages.
01:42Isn't that right?
01:43Isn't that right?
01:44Isn't that right?
01:45Isn't that right?
01:46What y'all doing?
01:47I came from the ghetto too!
01:49And a man who had overcome all the afflictions of a blighted inner city, who had built a store that was the work of his life, saw it all come down, and asked why.
02:03Hurricane Andrew.
02:04And here are the effects of Andrew as he begins to arrive here on Miami Beach.
02:09You can see the palms blowing, and then over here, you can see the sand, it's almost like a blizzard, a snowstorm of sand.
02:17And here you can see the wind is really picking up, in fact the car is rocking back and forth, and I'm sure that's evident in the picture.
02:24It's almost easier to describe Hurricane Andrew in terms of the statistics it wrought, causing havoc in the Bahamas and the American state of Louisiana.
02:32Hurricane Andrew was felt most strongly in Florida, taking place over the course of two terrifying weeks in August 1992.
02:40The tropical cyclone stood as the costliest, most devastating hurricane to hit Florida until Hurricane Irma in 2017.
02:47The leading edge of the storm that devastated South Florida, still at it this morning, now in the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country.
02:552,000 people huddled in one of many shelters in Lafayette.
03:04When the wind picked up, they were awakened at 3 am.
03:07In fact, it was the costliest in any part of the contiguous United States until the infamous Katrina of 2005.
03:14Costing oil companies are reported half a billion dollars due to damage sustained to oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
03:20Andrew was directly responsible for 65 deaths and nearly $30 billion in destruction.
03:26And Dave, for anyone living here on August 24th of 92, it's impossible to forget these images.
03:32I mean, take a look at the devastation that Hurricane Andrew left behind.
03:36The Category 5 storm was the most destructive hurricane to ever hit Florida in terms of structures damaged or destroyed.
03:43World Trade Center bombing.
03:45Nearly a decade before the now unforgettable events of September 11th, 2001 in New York City,
03:51extremist militant organization Al-Qaeda launched a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
03:56On Friday, February 26th, 1993, Ramsay Youssef and Iyad Ismail set off a bomb in its parking garage,
04:04killing six people, including a pregnant Port Authority employee.
04:08Hundreds more found themselves trapped in the dark, smoky towers.
04:11These are the first pictures from inside the garage.
04:14Yes, I see.
04:15And we're also told now that there are four people confirmed dead.
04:18We've called this the terror at the tower.
04:20And it's made even more so by the fact that it was an explosive device.
04:24And from now on, people in New York are going to feel even more vulnerable than they've ever felt before.
04:28And that's really terror. That's terrible.
04:30Look at that card, Jim.
04:31The goal of the attack, as stated by Youssef, was to strong arm the United States into dissolving its relationship with Israel,
04:37as well as staying out of the Middle East's business.
04:40Although it's been largely overshadowed by 9-11, the 1993 bombing was a senseless tragedy that saw over a thousand injured.
04:47If there's somebody trapped out there, what must they be going through right now?
04:51Panic. A feeling of total isolation. The forgottenness. The world has just forgotten them and they're all on their own.
05:01All afternoon, they've climbed the stairs going floor to floor.
05:06Waco Siege.
05:07The Waco Siege ends in an inferno. Only a handful of the 95 followers of David Koresh's cult are believed to have survived.
05:14But how much blame attaches to the FBI who assaulted the compound before the fire began?
05:19Founded in 1955 by Benjamin Roden, the General Association of Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists are widely regarded as a doomsday cult.
05:28Roden died in 1978, and his wife Lois assumed his place as Davidian prophet.
05:33That was until 1981, when Vernon Howell, who changed his name to David Koresh, arrived, amassing growing influence in the organization,
05:41until 1987, when he spun off his own sect of Davidians.
05:45The raid failed to flush out the cult members, who then, according to American officials, set light to the buildings.
05:52It seems only eight of the 95 inside, who included 26 British people and 17 children, survived the inferno.
06:00Koresh's Branch Davidians assimilated the original group by force.
06:03And in 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to raid the Mount Carmel Centre ranch.
06:10The ensuing 51-day standoff and firefight resulted in the deaths of four ATF agents, as well as 82 Branch Davidians, including 28 children.
06:20It's my impression that, from what I understand, that it was to the government's advantage that the compound either be demolished or destroyed or burned,
06:27because the physical evidence that might have some opportunity of disputing their contentions is now destroyed.
06:34Rwandan genocide.
06:36May 7. The massacres that have claimed up to 200,000 lives in Rwanda did not begin as a spontaneous outpouring of tribal rage,
06:44but rather as a systematic campaign of killing directed by political leaders and backed by the military.
06:49Over the course of just three months, from April to July of 1994, a coalition of extremist Hutu militia groups in the East African nation of Rwanda killed as many as an estimated 800,000 Tutsis.
07:02This was in addition to 10,000 members of the Toa peoples and up to 500,000 Tutsi women who were sexually assaulted by Hutu militants.
07:10June 10th. The commander of the small United Nations detachment in Rwanda conceded today that his efforts to broker a ceasefire in the civil war there have shown no signs of success.
07:20He predicted more fighting and more massacres.
07:23This was the Canadian general, Romeo Dallaire, who was deeply affected by his inability to stop this crisis going on.
07:31The most infamous moment of the larger Rwandan Civil War, which began in 1990 before ending in July 1994.
07:38The deadly chaos was spurred on by the assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Javier Imana.
07:44The genocide didn't end, per se. While the mass killing ceased, the conflict instead morphed into the First Congo War in 1996.
07:53There was, I think, just a collective willingness back in the United States and in all the world capitals to put your heads in the sand.
07:59I mean, this was only six months after we had lost a huge number of Army Rangers during the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia.
08:06And I think there was no appetite in Washington at that time to engage ourselves in another African tribal war.
08:12Oklahoma City bombing. On April 19, 1995, disgruntled Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh carried out the deadliest domestic terror attack ever committed on American soil, killing 169 people and injuring 684 more.
08:27Intended as revenge against the United States government for the raids at Ruby Ridge and Waco, McVeigh and co-conspirator Terry Nichols detonated a Ryder rental van on the north side of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
08:40The seismic blast has been compared to over 5,000 pounds of TNT and caused irreparable damage to over 300 nearby structures and buildings.
08:49Tried and convicted in 1997, McVeigh was executed in June of 2001 and Nichols was sentenced to life in prison just three years later.
08:57The deaths of the 168 people who died in the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were violent, unexpected and mourned by millions.
09:07Today, the man who killed those people died on schedule by lethal injection and no member of his family was in attendance.
09:16TWA Flight 800 explosion.
09:19Federal safety officials and the FBI and New York City law officials have been all over the scene in the Atlantic Ocean, some 10 miles south of East Mauritius on Long Island.
09:28There have been reports from a New York congressman that one of the plane's flight recorders have been found, but investigators so far are denying that report.
09:36Only 12 minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, Flight 800 exploded and killed all 230 people on board.
09:45Parallel criminal investigations undertaken by the FBI and JTTF took nearly a year and a half to determine that there had been no criminal element.
09:53And the resulting NTSB investigation took just over four years.
09:57Well, while many suggest not to jump to conclusions this early in the investigation, suspicion, even initial reaction, has questioned the possibility of a bomb, possibly terrorism.
10:08The immediate reaction is a bomb. I think that's the normal reaction.
10:12And with Bill Callahan's expertise in international security and investigation, with a background in narco terrorism, he now wonders.
10:19The costliest and most intensive assessment in aviation history up to that point, the NTSB determined that, in all likelihood, the tragedy was caused by, quote, a short circuit outside the center wing fuel tank that allowed excessive voltage to enter it through electrical wiring associated with the fuel quantity indication system, end quote.
10:40The NTSB hearings essentially concluded that the center wing tank exploded, but they did not define the cause of the initiation, but the initiating event which caused the center wing tank to explode.
10:54Centennial Olympic Park bombing.
10:56While fulfilling his job duties during the 1996 Summer Olympics, 33-year-old security guard Richard Jewell discovered a suspicious package under a bench at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia.
11:08While Jewell and his fellow security guards initiated an evacuation, the package, actually an explosive, was detonated, killing two people and injuring over 100 more.
11:18Yesterday, lawmen made a second trip to Richard Jewell's former home in Havisham County.
11:23Agents bagged potential evidence. They also removed paint samples and took photographs.
11:28Other investigators went to a Toco Hills hardware store asking about pipe that might have been used to make the bomb.
11:36Jewell was soon named as a major suspect and, as such, was hounded by the media and authorities, resulting in his trial in the court of public opinion.
11:45Eventually, further Atlanta bombings gave way to the FBI's identification of Eric Rudolph as the true perpetrator.
11:52In 2005, Rudolph was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
11:55Survivors of his clinic bombing finally got the opportunity to lash out at Rudolph.
12:00Been waiting seven and a half years for it and the main purpose was to see him and let him know he failed.
12:08Staring him dead in the eye, Emily Lyons blasted Eric Rudolph, calling him a failure and a coward.
12:15Murder of Gianni Versace.
12:17The stars and millions around the world are in shock over the execution-style murder of designer Gianni Versace, shot to death at point-blank range on the steps of his Miami Beach villa.
12:28Founder of the legendary luxury fashion brand that bore his name, Gianni Versace was a highly prominent fixture of 20th century high culture.
12:36The Italian designer and businessman was not only highly prolific, but deeply versatile.
12:41For example, he designed the costumes worn by musicians Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney in the 1983 Say Say Say Music video.
12:49Versace's life came to a disturbing end in 1997, upon being murdered by spree killer Andrew Cunanan.
12:56Cunanan, who by this point had already murdered four other men, took his own life just eight days later.
13:02Cunanan's exact motives for carrying out the murders remain chillingly unclear.
13:06So did Cunanan feel victimized by those around him, or abandoned when his relationship ended to a wealthy gay man?
13:13In a spree killer, it starts with an incident later in life.
13:17And that incident is what leads to that type of reckless and power-hungry or destructive behavior.
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13:40Columbine High School Massacre
13:43We still don't have the exact answers as to why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on their high school in Columbine, Colorado, on April 20th, 1999.
13:53What we do know, though, was that until 2012, their rampage was the deadliest of its kind at an American K-12 school, employing a combination of powerful firearms and improvised explosives.
14:05Sixteen people were killed, including Klebold and Harris, who made the choice to end their own lives at the scene after the massacre had ended.
14:12Efforts to determine the why of it all, beyond inflicting mass pain and suffering, have been poured over for decades, with no one any closer to understanding the duo's actions than the day they took place.
14:24Which 90s moment in our video shocked you the most? Are there any we missed? Be sure to let us know in the comments below.
14:30It was the first time agents had met face to face with Richard Jewell in three and a half days.
14:35We'll see you next time.
14:36We'll see you next time.
14:37We'll see you next time.
14:38We'll see you next time.
14:39We'll see you next time.
14:40We'll see you next time.
14:41Bye-bye.
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