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Dark Anniversary: ​​A Look Back at the 1996 Olympic Park Centennial Bombing – WSB-TV Channel 2

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ATLANTA — As the world watches the Summer Olympics in Paris, Saturday marks a dark day not only in Olympic history, but in Atlanta’s as well.

Just six days before the 1996 Olympic Games, here in Atlanta, construction of Centennial Olympic Park was finally completed.

City officials said they wanted to build a place to unite everyone, and that’s how 21 acres of downtown Atlanta became the centerpiece of the summer games.

And then something terrible happened.

On July 27, 1996, a bomb rocked the park.

“During the Olympics, we investigated 100 bomb threats a day,” said A.D. Frazier, who was the chief operating officer of the Atlanta Olympic Committee.

Security Officer Richard Jewell spotted the suspicious package and alerted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Jewell, GBI Agent Tom Davis and other law enforcement officers evacuated the area, including a nearby television camera tower.

That’s when the bomb went off.

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“It was a huge explosion,” Davis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2016. “A very loud explosion and a lot of heat. It knocked me to the ground. I saw people lying everywhere, a lot of them screaming and badly injured.”

Two people died and more than 100 were injured.

Davis was one of more than 100 wounded by shrapnel from the bomb. Nearby, he could see the body of Alice Hawthorne, a 44-year-old mother from Albany who had traveled to Atlanta with her daughter to attend the Games. Her 14-year-old daughter was injured.

“It was a very sad night. For it to be such a big event and for it to happen, it was very hard,” said Hawthorne’s cousin, Martha Peeples. Richard Elliot of Channel 2 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death in 2021.

The second person to die that night was Melih Uzunyol, a Turkish journalist who suffered a fatal heart attack while rushing to the scene.

Jewell was a prominent figure in the bombing, but his name was cleared years later. A plaque in the park commemorates his heroic actions.

“He was very happy, but he said, ‘That was my job, Mom, and I did it.’ And that was Richard,” his mother Bobi Jewell said.

Jewell died of a heart attack in 2007 at the age of 44.

Rudolph eventually admitted to carrying out the deadly attack, as well as three other attacks in Georgia and Alabama. He pleaded guilty to multiple counts of arson and using a destructive device in a violent crime.

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