About a month ago, a friend in our ward gave a talk about prophets, using the story of President Hunter getting a bomb threat during a BYU fireside. She was an eye-witness to the event since her husband Lee Perry was a stake president at the time and they were sitting on the stand. I think it is a riveting story despite having heard it before so I wanted to share it here:
President Hunter and the Bomb Threat
by Carolyn Perry
On February 7, 1993, Howard W. Hunter, then President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
was the speaker for the fireside at the BYU Marriott Center. Lee was a BYU stake president,
and we were sitting on the stand that evening. President Hunter’s health wasn’t good, and his
body was frail, but he was a determined man. He was a thoughtful, gentle, loving
and kind soul. President Hunter approached the pulpit with help from two brethren on the stand.
Within less than a half a sentence of his talk, screams were heard from the audience. A man had
jumped the security barrier, run onto the floor, carrying a briefcase, and holding what appeared
to be a detonator. He shouted to the audience that he had a bomb and shouted that they had to
leave and/or do what he told them to do (it was hard to understand him).
The assailant immediately approached President Hunter, held the detonator by his head, and
slammed a letter down on the podium demanding that President Hunter read it. President Hunter
stood his ground—just like a prophet of old. I felt nothing would have gotten him off his
path—not even the threat of death. It was unbelievable. Everything stood still for that time.
My thoughts raced to our home where our six children (ranging in almost two years to fourteen
years) were home alone, and what would happen to them if Lee and I both died that night. Cody
Judy, the assailant, soon told everyone else to clear the stand, and we all moved to the nearby
tunnel areas--except for two church security officers who refused to leave President Hunter’s
side. We could still see what was happening on the stand.
President Hunter remained perfectly calm throughout. He would not read the letter, which
supposedly called for the release of the current prophet and apostles and declared Judy the new
prophet. Then amazingly the young congregation began to sing. All four vibrant verses of “We Thank
Thee, Oh God, for A Prophet.” I remember feeling sweet gratitude to the students. I would have
never thought of singing!
Then things happened all at once. An older man walked close to the stand and tried to pepper
spray Judy. The security guards tackled Judy and forcefully knocked him off the stand to the
floor on the left side. Not sure how many students leaped out of the audience and piled on top of
Judy and the guards—10 to 50 are the different estimates.
In these moments, President Hunter had fallen down on the right side of the pulpit. Apparently,
an ROTC cadet was near and threw himself over the top of President Hunter, hugging him
tightly to his own body to protect the Apostle. President Mark Howard, a stake president, and a
colonel in the Air Force/National Guard, was back on the stand quickly. He told the cadet he
could get off President Hunter now. The young man didn’t budge. President Hunter was in some
physical distress by this time. The stake leader then commanded: “Private, this is Colonel Mark
Howard, and I ORDER you to get off President Hunter!” Gratefully he obeyed.
President Hunter was helped up, sat down, the cameras soon came back online, and a rest hymn
was song while everyone decompressed. Within minutes, the President was poised and standing
at the pulpit. He said, “I want to tell you how good your voices sound.” He gave with the talk he
had prepared…
“Life has a fair number of challenges in it,” he smiled as the audience laughed, and through a
grin he added, “as demonstrated …” He mentioned the serious global challenges facing people in the
early ‘90’s—the famine in Somalia, war in Yugoslavia and the Middle East, also the wars he had lived
through, the Great Depression, etc. He continued, "So I hope you won’t believe all the world’s
difficulties have been wedged into your decade, or that things have never been worse than they are for
you personally, or that they will never get better.”
“Contrary to what some might say, you have every reason in this world to be happy and to
be optimistic and to be confident. Every generation since time began has had some things
to overcome and some problems to work out. Furthermore, every individual person has a
particular set of challenges which sometimes seem to be earmarked for us individually. We
understood that in our premortal existence… those problems and prophecies were never
intended to do anything but bless the righteous and help those who are less righteous move
toward repentance.”
The briefcase bomb was mostly full of books—including the BOM (Book of Mormon); the
detonator was a toy phone wrapped in black tape, and Cody Judy did have some serious mental
health issues, spending years in a mental facility. President Hunter became the 14th President of
the Church on June 5, 1994, serving as Prophet for nine months.
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