A movie that was made by Utah filmmakers comes out this Friday called “The Cokeville Miracle.” It’s about a bombing that occurred in an elementary school in 1986.
David and Doris Young carried several guns and a homemade bomb into an elementary school in Cokeville, Wyoming. They gathered all the children and teachers into one room and threatened to blow them up.
After the bomb exploded, the only people who died were the man and wife who brought it in. All the children and teachers escaped.
Jennie Johnson, one of the survivors, said she had a hard time coping with the incident as a child.
“Smells of gasoline, being in a closed room, lights off, those kind of things really bothered me while I was young,” Johnson said.
She also said she had a spiritual experience that day. After the bomb went off, a deceased relative helped her out of the room. She assumed at the time that it was a teacher until one day when she looked at a photo album with her grandmother.
“I said ‘But where’s this teacher? Where is she? How come I never had her? She’s the one who helped me out of the Cokeville bomb,’” Johnson said. “And my grandmother’s like ‘No, that’s my great aunt, and she would have died before the bomb.’ I’m like, ‘No, she was there that day.’”
Director T.C. Christensen said he had heard news reports about the bombing, but he didn’t hear much about the spiritual side of it because most of that aspect came out later.
“Many times, the kids that had some of these spiritual experiences, they kinda felt weird about it, and they’d tell their parents, and their parents would start crying, and then the kids felt like ‘Did I do something wrong? I don’t know if I should be talking about this,’” Christensen said. “And it just took some maturity and some time before all of this side of it really started to come out.”
Christensen said he hopes the movie helps people recognize miracles in their lives.