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The Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics , in Atlanta.
Centennial Olympic Park was designed as the "town square" of the Olympics, and thousands of spectators had gathered for a late concert and merrymaking. Sometime after midnight, July 27, 1996.
Richard Jewell was working as a security guard for the event. He discovered the green backpack containing a fragmentation-laden pipe bomb under a bench.
And alerted Georgia Bureau of Investigation officers.
This discovery was nine minutes before Eric Robert Rudolph called 9-1-1 to deliver a warning. During a Jack Mack and the Heart Attack performance, Jewell and other security guards began clearing the immediate area so that a bomb squad could investigate the suspicious package. The bomb exploded 13 minutes later, killing Alice Hawthorne and injuring over one hundred others. A cameraman also died of a heart attack while running to cover the incident.
After the bombings, Richard Jewell was initially investigated as a suspect by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and news media aggressively focused on him as the presumed culprit when he was actually innocent. In October 1996, the FBI declared Jewell was no longer a person of interest. Following three more bombings in 1997, Rudolph was identified by the FBI as the suspect. In 2003, Rudolph was arrested, and in 2005 he agreed to plead guilty to avoid a potential death sentence. Rudolph was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for his crimes.
Persons involved.
- Richard Jewell, Initially hailed by the media as a hero, Jewell was later considered a suspect, before ultimately being cleared.
- Lucian Lincoln "Lin" Wood Jr, representing Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996.
- Kathleen Bentley Scruggs, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter who broke the news that the FBI was focusing on Richard Jewell.
- Eric Robert Rudolph, also known as the Olympic Park Bomber.
Victims
- Alice Jane Hawthorne,44, of Albany, Georgia, was killed in the explosion when a nail from the bomb penetrated her skull.
- Melih Uzunyo' 40, ,a Turkish cameraman of Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, had a fatal heart attack while running to the scene.
- The bomb wounded 111 others.
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