church members would come to worship him as david koresh. koresh being the hebrew name for cyrus, the legendary persian king and conquerer of babylon. >> he began to present the ideas that he had, and i would say 99% of the leadership of the church that were living at mount carmel accepted him as having a message from god. >> clive doyle is a branch davidian survivor, and to this day a believer in david koresh. >> david was constantly talking to god. god told me to do this. god told me to do that. we accepted that. >> god speaks to me. i have a message to present. >> to outsiders koresh soon transformed the davidian church into a cult. >> the most important element of the cult is the leader. and they always describe the same way as being charismatic. >> i mean, there are some things that god has concealed in his written word that are to be brought to do right before the end of time. >> koresh preached end of day philosophies to his followers, a belief system that was centered around a battle between evil armies led by a messianic leader who w

>> all things. >> david koresh came here, or vernon howell, who changed his name to david koresh, came here , you , and he started know, basically saying that he had a message and that god showed him things and lois studied with him. -- to a ped into a oint where lois called saul in april of 1984 to come to mount caramel and to listen to what vernon at that time had to say. and to see if he was going to be the next spiritual leader. >> talks about a ravenous bird from the east. a person. his name is koresh according to scripture. some theology majors say angel koresh which is english cyrus was a persian king. but the mystery is that the ancient sire ress -- in isaiah 45, that surname is sigh ress, hich is a last name. revelations says he has a new name. you have to look at a lot of things to catch the full picture. >> he believed he came to bring judgment on the church. and that he did. because we have to judge between truth and error and whether we should follow him or we should follow the holy spirit. nfortunately, it was prophesied that he would lead the leaders or church into aposi

everything we can to learn from these events about what we can do in the future to prevent people like david koresh or people motivated by other thoughts from causing such a senseless, horrible loss of human life. >> i think that this was, you know, a learning experience as well. i think we've had a lot of care in handling little groups since that time and that i would hope that both sides would learn something from all of that. and the constitution says that we should make no laws establishing religion nor preventing free exercise of religion. and so here little groups that want to exercise this freedom to pursue their understanding and their living out of christianity if they feel it is -- as they feel is appropriate. i think the nation has supported that. it's when you move from your belief system into some practices that are seen to be dangerous to others or harmful in some way that you might xpect government intervention. >> a 1953 tornado destroyed much of downtown waco and killed 114 people. it remains the 11th deadliest tornado in u.s. history. we spoke with the city of waco's municipal inf