Centennial Park Bombing

In the early-morning hours of July 27, 1996, a pipe bomb exploded in Atlanta's Centennial Park, the after-hours meeting place of the 1996 Olympic Games. The bombing killed one person and injured more than 100 others. A Turkish cameraman at the scene died of a heart attack.

A few minutes before 1 A.M., Richard Jewell, an AT&T security guard, alerted officials to a suspicious group of rowdy drunks near a sound tower in the park. Jewell had also noticed a suspicious green knapsack that had been left after the group dispersed. At 1:07 A.M. the police received an anonymous 911 call. The voice on the phone, which investigators would later identify as that of a white male with a slight Southern accent, said, “There's a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.”

Minutes later, bomb experts identified wire and a pipe bomb in the knapsack and began evacuating the area. Shortly after 1:20 A.M., the bomb exploded; investigators later discovered it to have actually been three pipe bombs filled with smokeless gunpowder, nails, and screws. Flying shrapnel caused most of the 111 injuries that night. By 2 that morning, all of downtown Atlanta had been sealed off.

From the start, authorities believed the bombing to be an act of domestic terrorism, partly because of the crude nature of the homemade pipe bomb, and partly because the attack did not appear to have an overtly political target. (Later reports suggest that the bomb was intentionally set to hurt the law enforcement officers assisting in the evacuation, a suggestion in keeping with the domestic terrorism hypothesis.) Early suspects included a local group of extremely violent skinheads and the Georgia Militia, a group that had been arrested in April 1996 for allegedly building pipe bombs. An eyewitness account reported four white men dressed in black acting suspiciously in the moments before the bombing.

Within three days of the bombing, however, Jewell, who had been lauded as a hero for two days following the bombing, was named as a suspect. He was also the first defendant named in a lawsuit charging that security had been slow to evacuate the area, causing extensive injuries. From August to October 1996, authorities made concerted efforts to link Jewell to forensic evidence, though hair samples and voice identification tests did not confirm his involvement and he was cleared. Later suspects included members of the Phineas Priesthood, who were caught in Spokane, Washington, after bombings at a newspaper, a bank, and a Planned Parenthood clinic. They, too, were cleared.

By June 1997, however, a handful of clinic and antigay bombings in the Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama, areas led investigators to another suspect—Eric Robert Rudolph. On October 14, 1998, more than two years after the fact, Rudolph was charged in connection with the Centennial Park bombing. As of 2002, he remains at large, believed to be hiding out in the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina, though some doubt he is still alive.