Posted on Aug 29, 2018
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Richard Jewell, the hero security guard turned Olympic bombing suspect, dies at age 44 of natural causes at his Georgia home.
On July 27, 1996, during the Summer Games in Atlanta, a pipe bomb with nails went off in crowded Centennial Olympic Park, killing one woman and injuring 111 other people. Shortly before the explosion, Richard Jewell, who was working as a temporary security guard in the area, discovered a suspicious-looking backpack abandoned beneath a park bench. Jewell alerted police to the backpack, which held a bomb, and moved people out of harm’s way before it exploded. In the aftermath of the bombing, Jewell was praised as a hero for his actions. However, three days later, the media reported that Jewell was being investigated as a suspect in the case. Although he was never arrested or charged with any crime, for the next three months, Jewell faced intense scrutiny from both law enforcement officials and the media, who combed through his background and tracked his movements. Even after the Justice Department officially cleared Jewell of any involvement in the bombing in late October 1996, some people still viewed him with suspicion.
Jewell later filed libel lawsuits against several major media companies and reached settlements with CNN and NBC, among others. Before his death on August 29, 2007, Jewell, who suffered from diabetes and other health problems, worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia. In 2006, during the 10-year anniversary of the Atlanta Olympics, Georgia governor Sonny Perdue publicly commended Jewell for saving lives at Centennial Park.
In May 2003, police in North Carolina captured Eric Rudolph, the real person responsible for the Olympic bombing, as well as the bombings of several abortion clinics and a gay bar. Rudolph, who eluded law enforcement authorities for years by living in the Appalachian wilderness, eventually pled guilty to his crimes and was sentenced to life in prison.
On July 27, 1996, during the Summer Games in Atlanta, a pipe bomb with nails went off in crowded Centennial Olympic Park, killing one woman and injuring 111 other people. Shortly before the explosion, Richard Jewell, who was working as a temporary security guard in the area, discovered a suspicious-looking backpack abandoned beneath a park bench. Jewell alerted police to the backpack, which held a bomb, and moved people out of harm’s way before it exploded. In the aftermath of the bombing, Jewell was praised as a hero for his actions. However, three days later, the media reported that Jewell was being investigated as a suspect in the case. Although he was never arrested or charged with any crime, for the next three months, Jewell faced intense scrutiny from both law enforcement officials and the media, who combed through his background and tracked his movements. Even after the Justice Department officially cleared Jewell of any involvement in the bombing in late October 1996, some people still viewed him with suspicion.
Jewell later filed libel lawsuits against several major media companies and reached settlements with CNN and NBC, among others. Before his death on August 29, 2007, Jewell, who suffered from diabetes and other health problems, worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia. In 2006, during the 10-year anniversary of the Atlanta Olympics, Georgia governor Sonny Perdue publicly commended Jewell for saving lives at Centennial Park.
In May 2003, police in North Carolina captured Eric Rudolph, the real person responsible for the Olympic bombing, as well as the bombings of several abortion clinics and a gay bar. Rudolph, who eluded law enforcement authorities for years by living in the Appalachian wilderness, eventually pled guilty to his crimes and was sentenced to life in prison.
Hero security guard wrongly accused as bombing suspect dies - Aug 29, 2007 - HISTORY.com
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Getting It Wrong: The Richard Jewell Case
Richard Jewell, 44, the security guard falsely suspected in the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing, died Aug. 29. Jewell first was hailed as a hero for spo...
Thank you my friend TSgt Joe C. for making us aware that on August 29, 2007 Richard Jewell, the hero security guard turned Olympic bombing suspect, died at age 44 of natural causes at his Georgia home.
Image: Richard Jewell, a hero-turned-suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, endured a personal nightmare before he was fully exonerated. Photograph - William Berry
Background from theguardian.com/sport/2016/jul/27/olympic-park-bombings-atlanta-1996-richard-jewell
"Richard Jewell’s vigilance saved countless lives, but the constellation of factors that conspired to destroy his name are even more present today. Has the media – and to a broader extent a society – learned anything?
Richard Jewell, a hero-turned-suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, endured a personal nightmare before he was fully exonerated. Photograph: William Berry/AP
The biggest hero of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta won no medals, broke no records and signed no endorsement deals. It was neither a lithe sprinter nor a limber gymnast. He was a 33-year-old security guard on temporary hire who lived with his mother.
The name of Richard Allensworth Jewell will forever endure in Olympic lore for the early morning of 27 July 1996, when he spotted an unattended green backpack beneath a light and sound tower at Centennial Olympic Park, the designated town square of the Atlanta Games. He immediately alerted Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) officers and began clearing the area. The pipe bomb within the knapsack exploded minutes later, causing the death of two people and injuring 111 others, but Jewell’s vigilance had spared countless lives and his hometown the gruesome legacy of what could have been the worst tragedy in Olympic history.
The bombing, which came only 10 days after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 killed all 230 people on board, cast a pall over the remainder of the Olympics and prompted heightened security measures that presaged America after 9/11. With the FBI under pressure to make an arrest and news organizations desperate for the scoop, a miscarriage of justice followed as Jewell went from a hero to a suspect within days, a burden that haunted him long past his ultimate exoneration until his 2007 death.
Twenty years on, as the Rio Olympics draw near amid an ever quickening news cycle with media outlets subject to even more competitive pressures, the saga of Jewell raises the question: what have we as an industry – and to a wider extent as a society – learned from the destruction of a man’s name? The answer is, not much.
•••
Jewell was one of about 30,000 police and guards, the largest peacetime security force in US history, enlisted to protect the Atlanta Olympics. He’d been hired as a temporary contractor by the security firm Anthony Davis Associates and had been on duty for nearly seven hours in Centennial Park when he spotted the unattended pack beneath a bench near the tower at 12.58am. Nine minutes later a 911 call from a nearby phone booth told dispatchers: “There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.”
At 1.15am, a team of security officers including Jewell began clearing the area. The contents, three pipe bombs surrounded by masonry nails, detonated roughly 10 minutes later before all spectators could be removed. Among the fallen were Alice Hawthorne, a 44-year-old cable TV company receptionist from Georgia who died of “multiple penetration injuries” from the flying metal fragments, and Turkish cameraman Melih Uzunyol, 40, who died of a heart attack while rushing to film the scene.
Olympic officials called a 5.15am press conference to say the Games would continue just as they had in Munich 1972, when Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli team members. Around 10am, President Bill Clinton condemned the bombing as a “pure act of terror” and an “act of cowardice which stands against the courage of the athletes”. He praised the security who spotted the package, called it in and prevented severe loss of life.
Behind the scenes Jewell was interviewed by the secret service, the GBI and the FBI. That night CNN reported that he was the first to catch sight of the suspicious bag and he was lauded as a hero in the next day’s papers. But when Piedmont College president Ray Cleere phoned the FBI the following afternoon to suggest that Jewell, a former campus security guard at the school with a reputation for overzealousness, might have planted the bomb himself in order to play the hero, the FBI looked further into his background.
A postmortem later filed by the justice department’s internal watchdog unit indicates that by Monday morning, Jewell had emerged as the FBI’s “principal (though not the only) suspect in the Centbom investigation”, saying that he fit the profile of a wannabe cop who believed that making himself a hero at the Olympics would help him land a permanent job in law enforcement. Sometime over the next day, an FBI source leaked Jewell’s name as a person of interest in the case.
At 4.50pm on Tuesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a special edition led by a 10-paragraph, 365-word story with no attribution that stated Jewell was the “focus of a federal investigation”. The banner headline screamed: FBI suspects ‘hero’ guard may have planted bomb.
Seven minutes later CNN broadcast the story, holding the Journal-Constitution up to the camera. At 5.11pm, the Associated Press released a wire story attributed to its own sources. Shortly after, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw said on air: “The speculation is that the FBI is close to ‘making the case’, in their language. They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still some holes in this case.”
A second-day opinion piece in the Atlanta newspaper only doubled down on the scoop: “Like this one, he became famous in the aftermath of murder. His name was Wayne Williams,” columnist Dave Kindred wrote, referencing the serial child murderer. “This one is Richard Jewell.’’
Over the next few weeks information exonerating Jewell came to light. Ten days after the bombing it was confirmed that Jewell could not have placed the 911 call given his established whereabouts. An exhaustive search of his mother’s apartment where he stayed turned up nothing. On 20 August, the Journal-Constitution reported that Jewell passed an polygraph test denying any involvement. “He didn’t do it,” retired FBI polygraph expert Richard Rackleff told the paper. “There’s not any doubt in my mind. He had no knowledge about the bomb ... The tests show he absolutely was not involved.”
On 26 October – nearly three months after that fatal night in the Olympic Centennial Park – US attorney Kent Alexander sent Jewell’s legal team a letter formally confirming that he was no longer a target of the investigation.
Six years later Eric Rudolph, a former US Army explosives expert, was convicted of the bombing – and the bombing of three abortion clinics across the south and – sentenced to four life terms without the possibility of parole at Colorado’s ADX Florence supermax prison.
The settlements Jewell won in subsequent years from NBC, CNN and the New York Post failed to grab a fraction of the headlines. The only law enforcement jobs he could land were $8 per hour jobs in tiny Georgia towns – Luthersville, Senoia, Pendergrass. He died of heart failure in 2007. He was 44.
•••
“In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true,” the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner wrote earlier this month in a treatise on the current state of journalism.
Those truths only underscore how the factors conducive to the media malpractice that conspired against Jewell – factors only amplified by a climate of paranoia and fear – are just as present today if not more so. Examples can be found everywhere from Reddit-driven witch hunt in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings to the Texas man wrongfully connected to the Dallas protest shooting earlier this month.
As the eyes of the world turn to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics, we can only hope for more careful treatment. For it seems a repeat of the past is inevitable."
Getting It Wrong: The Richard Jewell Case
"Richard Jewell, 44, the security guard falsely suspected in the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing, died Aug. 29. Jewell first was hailed as a hero for spotting a suspicious backpack and moving people away from a bomb. Later, he was named by news organizations as the focus of the investigation. After 88 days in the news, he was cleared."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqjqsCaUXvA
FYI Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown 1stSgt Eugene Harless CW5 John M. MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SSG James J. Palmer IV aka "JP4"SCPO Morris Ramsey SGT Michael Thorin SGT (Join to see) SGT Robert George SGT John " Mac " McConnell SP5 Mark Kuzinski SP5 Robert Ruck SPC Margaret Higgins Maj Marty Hogan SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SSgt Brian Brakke
Image: Richard Jewell, a hero-turned-suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, endured a personal nightmare before he was fully exonerated. Photograph - William Berry
Background from theguardian.com/sport/2016/jul/27/olympic-park-bombings-atlanta-1996-richard-jewell
"Richard Jewell’s vigilance saved countless lives, but the constellation of factors that conspired to destroy his name are even more present today. Has the media – and to a broader extent a society – learned anything?
Richard Jewell, a hero-turned-suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, endured a personal nightmare before he was fully exonerated. Photograph: William Berry/AP
The biggest hero of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta won no medals, broke no records and signed no endorsement deals. It was neither a lithe sprinter nor a limber gymnast. He was a 33-year-old security guard on temporary hire who lived with his mother.
The name of Richard Allensworth Jewell will forever endure in Olympic lore for the early morning of 27 July 1996, when he spotted an unattended green backpack beneath a light and sound tower at Centennial Olympic Park, the designated town square of the Atlanta Games. He immediately alerted Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) officers and began clearing the area. The pipe bomb within the knapsack exploded minutes later, causing the death of two people and injuring 111 others, but Jewell’s vigilance had spared countless lives and his hometown the gruesome legacy of what could have been the worst tragedy in Olympic history.
The bombing, which came only 10 days after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 killed all 230 people on board, cast a pall over the remainder of the Olympics and prompted heightened security measures that presaged America after 9/11. With the FBI under pressure to make an arrest and news organizations desperate for the scoop, a miscarriage of justice followed as Jewell went from a hero to a suspect within days, a burden that haunted him long past his ultimate exoneration until his 2007 death.
Twenty years on, as the Rio Olympics draw near amid an ever quickening news cycle with media outlets subject to even more competitive pressures, the saga of Jewell raises the question: what have we as an industry – and to a wider extent as a society – learned from the destruction of a man’s name? The answer is, not much.
•••
Jewell was one of about 30,000 police and guards, the largest peacetime security force in US history, enlisted to protect the Atlanta Olympics. He’d been hired as a temporary contractor by the security firm Anthony Davis Associates and had been on duty for nearly seven hours in Centennial Park when he spotted the unattended pack beneath a bench near the tower at 12.58am. Nine minutes later a 911 call from a nearby phone booth told dispatchers: “There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.”
At 1.15am, a team of security officers including Jewell began clearing the area. The contents, three pipe bombs surrounded by masonry nails, detonated roughly 10 minutes later before all spectators could be removed. Among the fallen were Alice Hawthorne, a 44-year-old cable TV company receptionist from Georgia who died of “multiple penetration injuries” from the flying metal fragments, and Turkish cameraman Melih Uzunyol, 40, who died of a heart attack while rushing to film the scene.
Olympic officials called a 5.15am press conference to say the Games would continue just as they had in Munich 1972, when Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli team members. Around 10am, President Bill Clinton condemned the bombing as a “pure act of terror” and an “act of cowardice which stands against the courage of the athletes”. He praised the security who spotted the package, called it in and prevented severe loss of life.
Behind the scenes Jewell was interviewed by the secret service, the GBI and the FBI. That night CNN reported that he was the first to catch sight of the suspicious bag and he was lauded as a hero in the next day’s papers. But when Piedmont College president Ray Cleere phoned the FBI the following afternoon to suggest that Jewell, a former campus security guard at the school with a reputation for overzealousness, might have planted the bomb himself in order to play the hero, the FBI looked further into his background.
A postmortem later filed by the justice department’s internal watchdog unit indicates that by Monday morning, Jewell had emerged as the FBI’s “principal (though not the only) suspect in the Centbom investigation”, saying that he fit the profile of a wannabe cop who believed that making himself a hero at the Olympics would help him land a permanent job in law enforcement. Sometime over the next day, an FBI source leaked Jewell’s name as a person of interest in the case.
At 4.50pm on Tuesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a special edition led by a 10-paragraph, 365-word story with no attribution that stated Jewell was the “focus of a federal investigation”. The banner headline screamed: FBI suspects ‘hero’ guard may have planted bomb.
Seven minutes later CNN broadcast the story, holding the Journal-Constitution up to the camera. At 5.11pm, the Associated Press released a wire story attributed to its own sources. Shortly after, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw said on air: “The speculation is that the FBI is close to ‘making the case’, in their language. They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still some holes in this case.”
A second-day opinion piece in the Atlanta newspaper only doubled down on the scoop: “Like this one, he became famous in the aftermath of murder. His name was Wayne Williams,” columnist Dave Kindred wrote, referencing the serial child murderer. “This one is Richard Jewell.’’
Over the next few weeks information exonerating Jewell came to light. Ten days after the bombing it was confirmed that Jewell could not have placed the 911 call given his established whereabouts. An exhaustive search of his mother’s apartment where he stayed turned up nothing. On 20 August, the Journal-Constitution reported that Jewell passed an polygraph test denying any involvement. “He didn’t do it,” retired FBI polygraph expert Richard Rackleff told the paper. “There’s not any doubt in my mind. He had no knowledge about the bomb ... The tests show he absolutely was not involved.”
On 26 October – nearly three months after that fatal night in the Olympic Centennial Park – US attorney Kent Alexander sent Jewell’s legal team a letter formally confirming that he was no longer a target of the investigation.
Six years later Eric Rudolph, a former US Army explosives expert, was convicted of the bombing – and the bombing of three abortion clinics across the south and – sentenced to four life terms without the possibility of parole at Colorado’s ADX Florence supermax prison.
The settlements Jewell won in subsequent years from NBC, CNN and the New York Post failed to grab a fraction of the headlines. The only law enforcement jobs he could land were $8 per hour jobs in tiny Georgia towns – Luthersville, Senoia, Pendergrass. He died of heart failure in 2007. He was 44.
•••
“In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true,” the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner wrote earlier this month in a treatise on the current state of journalism.
Those truths only underscore how the factors conducive to the media malpractice that conspired against Jewell – factors only amplified by a climate of paranoia and fear – are just as present today if not more so. Examples can be found everywhere from Reddit-driven witch hunt in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings to the Texas man wrongfully connected to the Dallas protest shooting earlier this month.
As the eyes of the world turn to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics, we can only hope for more careful treatment. For it seems a repeat of the past is inevitable."
Getting It Wrong: The Richard Jewell Case
"Richard Jewell, 44, the security guard falsely suspected in the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing, died Aug. 29. Jewell first was hailed as a hero for spotting a suspicious backpack and moving people away from a bomb. Later, he was named by news organizations as the focus of the investigation. After 88 days in the news, he was cleared."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqjqsCaUXvA
FYI Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown 1stSgt Eugene Harless CW5 John M. MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SSG James J. Palmer IV aka "JP4"SCPO Morris Ramsey SGT Michael Thorin SGT (Join to see) SGT Robert George SGT John " Mac " McConnell SP5 Mark Kuzinski SP5 Robert Ruck SPC Margaret Higgins Maj Marty Hogan SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SSgt Brian Brakke
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SFC Shirley Whitfield 1SG Carl McAndrews MSG Mark Million COL Lee Flemming PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SCPO Morris Ramsey SFC William Farrell Alan K. LTC Greg Henning MSgt Stephen Council Sgt Trevor Barrett Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MSG Andrew White SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth Cpl Scott McCarroll LTC John Shaw LTC John Griscom SSgt (Join to see) SGT Jim Arnold
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That pipe bomb went off a week after we were back from security detail for the pre-Olympics.
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