Dark anniversary: A look back on the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing

As the world watches the summer Olympic games in Paris, Saturday marks a dark day in not only Olympic history but Atlanta’s as well.

Just six days before the 1996 Olympics games here in Atlanta, construction finally wrapped up on Centennial Olympic Park.

City officials said they wanted to construct a place to unify everyone, and so 21 acres in 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 for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

Security guard Richard Jewell spotted the suspicious pack and alerted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Jewell, GBI agent Tom Davis, and other law enforcement officers cleared the area, including a nearby TV camera tower.

That’s when the bomb exploded.

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“It was just a huge explosion,” Davis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2016 . “A very loud explosion and a lot of heat. It forced me to the ground. I just saw people laying everywhere, many of them screaming and hurt severely.”

Two people died. More than 100 were injured.

Davis was one of the more than 100 who were injured 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 see the Games. Her 14-year-old daughter was injured.

“It was a very sad night. For it to be such a great event and then for this to take place, it was very hard,” Hawthorne’s cousin Martha Peeples told Channel 2′s Richard Elliot on the 25th anniversary of her death in 2021.

The second person who died that night was Melih Uzunyol, a Turkish journalist who suffered a fatal heart attack as he rushed to the scene.

Jewell was a person of interest in the bombing, but his name was cleared years later. A plaque at the park honors his heroics.

“He would be very thrilled, but he would say, “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 age 44.

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

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