Richard Jewell

On July 27, 1996, Richard Jewell was a security guard at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, with aspirations of becoming a police officer. At around 1 a.m. in crowded Centennial Olympic Park, Jewell noticed an unattended green knapsack, alerted police and helped move people away from the site. The knapsack contained a crude pipe bomb, which exploded and killed one person, injuring 111 others. In the first few days after the bombing, Richard Jewell was lauded as a hero, but only three days later the "Atlanta Journal Constitution" published a story headlined "FBI Suspects Hero Guard May Have Planted Bomb." The story stated that police were investigating the possibility that Jewell had planted the bomb. FBI agents aggressively questioned Jewell and searched his apartment. A large crowd of journalists and cameras hovered nearby as his property was hauled away as evidence. Two bombing victims even sued Jewell, despite the fact Jewell passed a polygraph and was never charged with any crime. U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno refused to clear Jewell or apologize to him. It was not until October 1996 that the FBI cleared Jewell as a suspect, and the lawsuits against Jewell were dismissed. The former hero lived for months under a very dark cloud. Tearful and painfully shy, Jewell criticized the FBI and the news media for how his case was handled. In August 1997 Attorney General Reno publicly apologized to Jewell and deplored the leak to the media that made his name known as a suspect. Jewell eventually got a job with a police force in tiny Luthersville, Georgia. He also filed several lawsuits against The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and several news stations for libel. He settled most of these cases. The FBI later charged a man named Eric Robert Rudolph with the Centennial Olympic Park bombing.