Day 18: Richard Jewell and the Olympic Park Bombing
Unfortunately a busy work week and some other podcasting engagements rendered me unable to produce a blog on Day 17. Trust me, I still 1996’d. Sort of.
Previously I shared some memories and critical moments of the 1996 Summer Olympics that stood out to me back then and that still I fondly remember now. But as many are aware, the stories and memories created by the competitions that year were not the biggest ones we were left with when it was all over. Last night I stepped away from 1996 to watch a 2019 movie about a critical figure from 1996: Richard Jewell.
The Richard Jewell story is likely the second most known, in my mind, true crime story to occur in 1996. The first? Jon Benet Ramsey. But that will be a later entry. As a true crime nut, I make no apologies for featuring these types of stories as part of my 1996 experience. Stories like these do more to define a year and add context to the current events of the time than any form of entertainment.
The movie Richard Jewell was entertaining and mostly accurate surrounding the event itself, which is most of what I was interested in. There are some inaccuracies centered on some other figures in the story but I’m not going to focus on those here. The thing I wanted to see, take in, and relive was the moment itself. If you’re somehow still unaware, I’m referring to the pipe bomb incident that took place at a concert at Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta during the Olympic games. Security was on hand for the event and despite being pre-9-11, potential terrorist threats loomed and security was high. The threat of a terrorist attack was something to take serious for former-cop turned security guard named Richard Jewell who had a reputation for doing his job a little too doggedly. He spotted a suspicious bag and took it very seriously, more seriously than the official badged police on hand. The police eventually obliged to his persistent wishes to have the bag checked by an expert and it was determined to be a real bomb. Jewell then tried to rush people away from the scene before it exploded and he successfully did so. The blast could have been more deadly but thanks to Jewell noticing it and getting people away and the fact that the bag had been jostled at some point which re-aimed the explosion upward instead of outward, only one life was lost directly due to the bomb (44 year old Alice Hawthorne). Another man, Melih Uzunyol, 40, a Turkish cameraman, died of a heart attack trying to get to the scene. 111 people were seriously injured. Jewell was labeled a hero!
For three days.
After that he became a suspect, primarily due to the FBI, and the US government at large, needing to look good to the world by identifying a suspect as fast as possible. They even tried to railroad him and trickily subvert his rights by having him sign a Miranda waiver on false pretenses. The media did Richard no favors either, and his life was forever changed. This all despite the fact that a warning call about the bomb had been placed to 911 from the bomber via a payphone that would have been physically impossible for Jewell to reach on foot and get back to the site of the blast according to the timeline of events. He was under world scrutiny for the terrorist attack for 88 days. He was officially cleared two years later when Eric Rudolph, a known serial bomber, confessed to the attacks.
I was 11 years old during this time, and turned 12 somewhere in that 88 day span, and I don’t remember any major announcement that Jewell had been cleared and dropped from the suspect list. For a long time after the event I associated Jewell with being the bomber. Quite unfortunate. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who missed the memo. Jewell was innocent. But more accurately, he was a hero that day. He died in 2007.
If you are interested, I recommend the movie Richard Jewell. Just know that any film that documents history will have sensational inaccuracies and it is up to you to do your own research. From what I read, the accounts of the event that day were portrayed accurately and I have to shout out the actor who was Richard Jewell in the movie, Paul Walter Hauser, for being incredible.
“Un-break my heart
Say you’ll love me again”
