The
Centennial Olympic Park bombing was a
domestic terrorist pipe bombing attack on the
Centennial Olympic Park in
Atlanta,
Georgia, on July 27 during the
1996 Summer Olympics. The blast directly killed 1 person and injured 111 others; another person later died of a heart attack. It was the first of four bombings committed by
Eric Rudolph.
[1] Security guard
Richard Jewell discovered the bomb before detonation and cleared most of the spectators out of the park. Rudolph, a carpenter and handyman, had detonated three pipe bombs inside a U.S. military
ALICE Pack. Motivated by what he considered to be the government's sanctioning of "abortion on demand", Rudolph wanted to force the cancellation of the Olympics.
After the bombings, Jewell was temporarily investigated as a suspect by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the news media falsely focused on him aggressively as the presumed culprit. However, in October 1996, Jewell was exonerated when the FBI declared that he 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 tried before being convicted two years later. Rudolph was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for his crimes.
Bombing[edit]
The pack had a directed charge and could have done more damage but it was slightly moved at some point.
[3] It used a
steel plate as a directional device.
[4] Investigators would later tie the
Sandy Springs and Otherside bombs together with this first device because all were propelled by
nitroglycerin dynamite, used an alarm clock and Rubbermaid containers, and contained steel plates.
[5]FBI Agent David (Woody) Johnson received notice that a call to 911 was placed about 18 minutes before the bomb detonated warning that a bomb would go off at the park within 30 minutes by "a white male with an indistinguishable American accent".
[6]Security guard
Richard Jewell discovered the bag underneath a bench and alerted
Georgia Bureau of Investigation officers.
[7] Tom Davis of the
Georgia Bureau of Investigation, called in a bomb ordnance squad which included members of the
ATF and
FBI to investigate the suspicious bag, that was leaning against the 40-ft
NBC sound tower.
[6] Jewell and other security guards began clearing the immediate area so that a
bomb squadcould investigate the suspicious package. The bomb detonated two to three minutes into the evacuation, before all spectators could leave the area.
[6]The sound of the explosion was recorded by a news crew from the German public television network
ARD, who were interviewing American swimmer
Janet Evans at a nearby hotel.
[8][9]Victims[edit]
Reaction[edit]
As the park reopened following the bombing.
President Bill Clinton denounced the explosion as an "evil act of terror" and vowed to do everything possible to track down and punish those responsible.
[11] Despite the event, officials and athletes agreed that the
games should continue as planned.
Aftermath[edit]
Richard Jewell falsely implicated[edit]
Though Richard Jewell was hailed as a hero for his role in discovering the bomb and moving spectators to safety,
news organizations later reported that Jewell was considered a potential
suspect in the bombing, four days afterward, and shortly after a brief, mistaken detainment of two juvenile persons of interest at the
Kensington MARTA station. Jewell, at the time, was unknown to authorities, and a
lone wolf profile made sense to
FBI investigators after being contacted by his former employer at Piedmont College.
Jewell was named as a
person of interest, although he was never arrested. Jewell's home was searched and his background exhaustively investigated and he became the subject of intense media interest and surveillance, including a media siege of his home.
[3]After Jewell was exonerated, he initiated
defamation lawsuits against
NBC News,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other media entities, and insisted on a formal apology from them. Jewell's lawsuit accused Piedmont College President Raymond Cleere of falsely describing Jewell as a "badge-wearing zealot" who "would write epic police reports for minor infractions".
[12] The cases were later settled after 15 years of litigation with the
Georgia Court of Appeals decision in July 2012, that the newspapers accurately reported that Jewell was the key suspect in the bombing, and emphasized he was only a suspect and the potential issues in the law enforcement case against him.
[13]Conviction of Eric Robert Rudolph[edit]
After Jewell was cleared, the FBI admitted it had no other suspects, and the investigation made little progress until early 1997, when two more bombings took place at an
abortion clinic and a
lesbian nightclub, both in the Atlanta area. Similarities in the bomb design allowed investigators to conclude that this was the work of the same perpetrator. One more bombing of an abortion clinic, this time in
Birmingham, Alabama, which killed a policeman working as a security guard and seriously injured nurse
Emily Lyons, gave the FBI crucial clues including a partial license plate.
The plate and other clues led the FBI to identify Eric Robert Rudolph as a suspect. Rudolph eluded capture and became a
fugitive; officials believed he had disappeared into the rugged southern
Appalachian Mountains, familiar from his youth. On May 5, 1998, the FBI named him as one of its
ten most wanted fugitives and offered a
$1,000,000 reward for information leading directly to his arrest. On October 14, 1998, the
Department of Justice formally named Rudolph as its suspect in all four bombings.
After more than five years on the run, Rudolph was arrested on May 31, 2003, in
Murphy, North Carolina, by a
rookie police officer, Jeffrey Scott Postell of the Murphy Police Department behind a
Save-A-Lot store at about 4 a.m.; Postell, on routine patrol, had originally suspected a burglary in progress.
[14]On April 8, 2005, the government announced Rudolph would plead guilty to all four bombings, including the Centennial Olympic Park attack.
Rudolph's justification for the bombings according to his April 13, 2005 statement, was political:
[15]- In the summer of 1996, the world converged upon Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Under the protection and auspices of the regime in Washington millions of people came to celebrate the ideals of global socialism. Multinational corporations spent billions of dollars, and Washington organized an army of security to protect these best of all games. Even though the conception and purpose of the so-called Olympic movement is to promote the values of global socialism, as perfectly expressed in the song Imagine by John Lennon, which was the theme of the 1996 Games even though the purpose of the Olympics is to promote these ideals, the purpose of the attack on July 27 was to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.
- The plan was to force the cancellation of the Games, or at least create a state of insecurity to empty the streets around the venues and thereby eat into the vast amounts of money invested.
On August 22, 2005, Rudolph, who had previously received a
life sentence for the Alabama bombing, was sentenced to three concurrent terms of life imprisonment without
parole for the Georgia incidents. Rudolph read a statement at his sentencing in which he apologized to the victims and families only of the Centennial Park bombing, reiterating that he was angry at the government and hoped the Olympics would be canceled. At his sentencing, fourteen other victims or relatives gave statements, including the widower of Alice Hawthorne.
As reported in an April 8, 2013, Alabama blog,
[16] in February 2013, LuLu.com published Rudolph's book,
Between the Lines of Drift: The Memoirs of a Militant, and in April 2013 the U.S. Attorney General seized his $200 royalty to help pay off the $1 million that Rudolph owes in restitution to the state of Alabama.
