Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Olympic Profiles-Richard Jewell

Richard Jewell was a guy who wanted nothing more than to be in law enforcement and to be a hero. In 1996 at the Atlanta Olympiad he got his wish and it turned out to be a nightmare.

While working as a security guard during the games in his home state of Georgia Jewell, a heavy set man who had a myriad of health problems, not the least of which was diabetes, discovered a suspicious knapsack in one of the Olympic venues and called the Atlanta police in to check it out. He then did what the had wanted to do all his life, he kept others away from the knapsack because he thought there might be an explosive in it. Turns out when the knapsack exploded and filled air with gunpowder and nails he was right. One woman died as a result of her injuries and 11 others were injured from the bomb blast but there is no question that due to his quick thinking and quick action many people were saved from injury and death.

At first Jewell was hailed as a hero, and rightly so. But then the investigators got lazy and decided that perhaps Jewell was a glory hound who had planted the bomb himself so he look like a hero when he saved lots of people from being hurt or killed. Jewell found out he was a suspect from an article in his local newspaper. As soon as the story broke the FBI singled out Jewell as their number one suspect and they did their best to make the evidence fit their version of the crime. At one point a not so enterprising FBI agent tried to get Jewell to appear in a training film, which was a ruse to try to get him on camera admitting to something he did not do. For months the Atlanta police, the FBI, and the Justice Department made Jewell's life a living hell and the press, most notably the Atlanta Journal Constitution, NBC News, and CNN all decided that Jewell was guilty and they smeared him day after day on television and in print.

Finally in Oct. of '96 the Justice Department saw that there was no case against Jewell because he was innocent. So they dropped their prosecution of him and cleared him of all the charges. But since having your life turned upside down and your good name dragged through the mud would tend to piss one off, Jewell did the only thing he could do to clear his name in the court of public opinion, he sued NBC, CNN, and the parent company of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He won settlements against CNN and NBC but his case against the newspaper was ultimately tossed out of court.

Jewell's life never was the same after this incident due to the stress and hoopla of the case and the ensuing law suits but he did achieve a measure of closure when Christian terrorist, homophobe, and abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph admitted to setting the Olympic park bomb in Atlanta. Rudolph got life in federal prison and Jewell went on to work again in law enforcement where he was lauded for his 'conscientious' work. In 2006 the then Gov. of Georgia Sonny Perdue publicly thanked Jewell for his heroism in the Olympic bombing ordeal.

In 2007 Richard Jewell passed away from complications of his diabetes. His cause of death was listed as 'natural causes' but one would have to think that the ordeal of being hailed as a hero and then being the main suspect in the bombing that took a life and injured 11 others and the resultant media and law enforcement circus took years off Mr. Jewell's life, just as his diabetes did.

Jewell's Olympic moment proved to be both a great and terrible thing for him.

6 comments:

Lockwood said...

What a frikkin' country we live in. I knew that he had been exonerated, but I didn't know the full back story, nor did I know that he had died. "I have nothing to hide therefore govt. incursions into my life are unimportant" has never been such such a poignantly wrong sentiment. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Kulkuri said...

Cops are basically lazy, they go after the first one on the scene. The one who finds the body, bomb, whatever.

He sued and won some money from a couple of those that made his life a hell. If I remember right he had some lawsuits in the works that had not been settled when he died.

Nan said...

I see the Richard Jewell case as being totally typical of law enforcement in general. Cops, with a few very rare exceptions, are lazy.

Devilham said...

I couldn't agree more Dr., that was a sad chapter in media malfeasance and law enforcement laziness. He was a geek, a geek for police work, like I am a geek for cooking or IT, and we geeks don't take kindly to the world smacking our kind down. I wrote a similar post myself the week he died, very, very sad.

http://devilhamsattic.blogspot.com/2007/08/richard-jewell.html

Margaret Benbow said...

Thank you for giving justice to Mr. Jewell. This was a shocking case and I have no doubt he died in large part from the mental torture he had been through. There is no monetary settlement that could repay the long-drawn-out crucifixion he endured.

Life As I Know It Now said...

You are absolutely right. It happens to other people too a lot more than we think it does.