This consistency is one of the markers of reliable first-person testimony. Trauma can distort memory, and retrospective accounts of extreme events are not infallible. But the stability of Okene’s core account across more than a decade of interviews — with the same specific details appearing in multiple independent accounts of conversations with different interviewers — is evidence of a genuine underlying memory rather than a confabulated narrative.
The specific language he has used to describe particular moments is worth preserving where it appears in verified sources. “I don’t know what stopped the water from filling that room. I was calling on God. He did it.” This sentence, which appears in the ajc.com account, is direct, economical, and theologically precise. He does not claim to understand the mechanism. He attributes it to God. He does not elaborate or argue. The sentence contains a genuine epistemological humility about the mechanism alongside a genuine theological conviction about the cause. These are not contradictory positions within his framework; they are the same position expressed from different angles.
“Every week I ask [God] ‘Why only me? Why did my colleagues have to die?'” This formulation — the weekly question, directed at God, about the survivors’ guilt that does not resolve — appears in multiple account summaries. The weekly cadence suggests a ritual dimension: not a question asked once and then set aside, but a recurring return to the unanswerable that has become part of his ongoing relationship with the experience.
“I have faced a lot of my fears in my life, and I decided to face this once and for all.” This is the language of decision and agency, framing the career choice as an assertion of will over fear. Whether this accurately describes his internal experience, or whether it is the language that gives public form to something more complex, is not something outside reporting can determine. What is established is that this is the language he has chosen to use in multiple public contexts to describe the choice.