The Oklahoma City bombings and the Columbine shootings weren't the only awful events that happened on the nineteenth day of the fourth month of the year. 22 years ago on this day, the famed battleship USS Iowa was engaged in training exercises off the cost of Puerto Rico when a tremendous explosion rocked the ship's #2 gun turret. When it was over, 47 sailors had perished.
The tragedy was greatly compounded by what followed. Immediately afterward, the ship's Executive Officer ordered an effort to restore the damaged turret, erasing a great deal of evidence. And Naval officials, upon learning that one gunner's mate, Clayton Hartwig, and another sailor, Kendall Truitt, had taken out life insurance policies on each other (apparently and old and standard custom among battleship sailors), quickly cobbled up an egregious and calumnious explanation for the tragedy: it wasn't a horrible accident, it was deliberate mass murder by a scorned homosexual. Although Truitt was the original suspect, attention quickly turned to Hartwig, for a simple reason: Truitt had survived. Hartwig hadn't. Dead Men Don't Hire Lawyers.
For a long time the working theory was that Hartwig had made an advance at another sailor, been rebuffed, and got revenge by inserting a bomb in between the powder bags being rammed into the gun for a firing exercise. The fact that assignments had been changed at the last moment, meaning that Hartwig wouldn't have known until minutes before the exercise that he'd be in a physical position to do such a thing, did not affect the judgment of the investigators. Their sole bit of evidence was an "admission" extracted from another sailor (after coercive interrogation) that Hartwig had made a pass at him. Within a day, the sailor recanted; the investigators dismissed the recantation on the grounds that the sailor had only recanted on statement (never mind it was the only one he had made).
Eventually the investigators had to give up their neat little homophobic theories and decided that Hartwig was simply trying to commit suicide. No evidence emerged that Hartwig was suicidal. Later, under pressure from Congress, the Navy apologized to Hartwig's parents, admitting that they had no evidence that the explosion was deliberate. Many Naval officials, however, continued to privately believe that it was.
Although the cause of the explosion has never been officially determined to this day, experiments done at Sandia Laboratories verified that it could in fact have happened accidentally, and suggested that unauthorized experimentation with firing protocols, as well as deteriorated gunpowder in the powder bags, could have contributed to it.
A year and a half later, the Iowa was decommissioned.
Much of the information regarding the anti-gay scapegoating can be found in Randy Shilts' Conduct Unbecoming. General information on the tragedy can be found in the Wikipedia article on the explosion.
One would hope that nowadays, the anti-gay scapegoating wouldn't have worked as well as it did 22 years ago. The late 90s represented the recent peak of American homophobia, largely because many people (though not scientists) believed that HIV could be spread by casual contact. It was just a couple years after Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld sodomy laws.