The Eyes of the World
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This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Space Jam. July 4th is Independence Day. The first night of the 100th anniversary of the world's greatest sporting event and no birthday party ever had an invitation list quite like this.

Welcome to Atlanta's Olympic Stadium. Well, the Olympics were in Atlanta in 1996, and it was a really big gig for us. I mean, there was, I don't know, 40, 50, 60,000 people every night in Centennial Park. Bill Bergman and Andrew Kastner are two members of the band Jack Mack and the Heart Attack. They were slated to perform 10 nights in a row at the 1996 Olympics. Center stage, the gig of a lifetime. We rehearsed a special show just for that event.

Olympic gig, and every night we would come on after Travis Tritt or Kenny Rogers or all kinds of different people. And we would play 11 at night to 1 in the morning. But the sixth night of their run would be their last. There was a lot of security to get backstage. They ran us through Interpol. I mean, I play saxophone, and the guy literally looked down my horn through the tube, and

But anybody could get into the audience. I don't even know if there was any security at all. Well, no. I mean, you have 50,000 people wearing their backpacks into that park. And it was a ginormous stage, and they had these two caterpillar-looking things on each side of the stage that were 150 feet long and 100 feet up in the air, and that's where they would show the videos.

We were seven stories up and we're playing our set and we're grooving. I mean, everything is just perfect. And then we were getting towards the end of the set and we did an original song called I Walked Alone. And it was right after the song ended and our lead singer started announcing the next song. Oh yeah, are you still out there? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

So we're gonna party till the sun comes up. But you know what? See, right about now, we have the privilege of working with this. And that's when the bomb went off. We just froze in place. The whole band just froze. We didn't know what to do. And then somebody came up to us and said, we gotta get out of the park. It was instantaneous pandemonium like the world rarely sees. ♪

Some ideas are so explosive, they change the world. But sometimes, they jeopardize the very ground we stand on, leaving ordinary lives in their wake, rippling out for generations. I'm Cole Acasio, and this is Flashpoint. Episode 1, The Eyes of the World. In the summer of 96, Atlanta was booming. Known the world over for products like Coca-Cola and CNN, Atlanta was a bustling hub of Americana.

We were the mecca of hip-hop, the home of the Braves. And that summer, we were hosting the Centennial Olympic Games. Ten years ago, bringing the Olympics to this city was the improbable, some would say laughable notion of a local real estate lawyer and former Georgia football player, Billy Payne. But Payne is from an ambitious city where grand notions are not dismissed. So Atlanta now has its games, and it also has its opportunity to define itself for the world. Atlanta's unique.

It's not movie famous like New York or LA. It's not a city people dream of living in. It's hot. The traffic sucks. The bugs bite. It's a little bit shitty, but in all the right ways. It's a place where I just think people can be themselves. Earlier this year, I found myself downtown just past midnight, standing in line and wrapped around the block with hundreds of other people. We were there to listen to Andre 3000 play a flute for two hours. And people were dressed to the nines. I'm talking suits, velvet, cashmere, you name it.

It felt like a true homecoming for someone who helped put our city on the map. And when he took the stage, the first thing he said was, "It's good to be back home. Atlanta's my home. I was born here. I grew up here. I always thought I'd move away to some other big city. I tried that. But I ended up finding my way back, and I grew into myself here. For reasons you'll come to understand, I've always been obsessed with the bombing at the Olympics. The ripple effects of that summer. Everything that happened in the following years.

All the lesser known parts of the story. But back in 96, with the eyes of the world on Atlanta and millions of people descending on the city too busy to hate, we had finally arrived in the world stage. It was our time. As an anchor reporter for 37 years, I covered all kinds of things. My name is Monica Kaufman Pearson.

I am a former reporter and anchor with WSB television, and I was there in September 1990 when they said... The International Olympic Committee has awarded the 1996 Olympic Games to the city of Atlanta. And I can still see to this day...

Mayor Maynard Jackson rubbing his hands through his hair and just grinning from ear to ear. The place just broke out. I mean, screams, tears, jumping up and down because the committee had been working on this for such a long time. People went bonkers.

I'm Kent Alexander. I was the United States Attorney in the Northern District of Georgia, so technically that made me the Chief Federal Law Enforcement Officer during the Olympics. I was at Underground Atlanta, where they had big monitors and they had hundreds and hundreds of people. None of us could really believe it.

And there was just massive celebration. It was first thing in the morning. Many of the front page versions of the Atlanta Constitution had this iconic, huge type, It's Atlanta. Then one of them actually said, as a subtitle, City Explodes and Thrill of Victory, which it turns out was ironic. With a $1.7 billion price tag, the city of Atlanta had under six years to transform into a worthy host city.

The Olympics hosted millions of attendees and spanned 29 facilities, including five new venues, plus a brand new park in the middle of downtown to serve as the congregating spot for the general public, Centennial Olympic Park. On July 19th, the date finally arrived, opening ceremonies, the one where Muhammad Ali valiantly raised his shaking torch and lit up the night. And look, it's Muhammad Ali. What a moment.

But less than 10 days after that iconic moment, the games, my home, and America's sense of collective safety would crack wide open. And it only took one Southern nut to fuck it all up. July 27th, 1996, 12:45 AM. The music is blasting, people are partying, everyone's enjoying themselves at Centennial Park. Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Tom Davis was walking next to the light and sound tower when he was approached by a local security guard.

I was approached by a young man named Richard Jewell, a security guard there for the NBC tower. Richard explained to me that he was having problems with intoxicated individuals throwing beer cans into the tower and we asked for some help. So I walked over to the front of the tower with Richard.

And as we walked around to the front part of the tower, we observed a number of college-aged individuals scooping up beer cans. They threw the beer cans away and then basically just disappeared into the crowd. Richard and I walked back around to the front of the tower, and as we were standing there talking, he looked down and pointed to an Army-type backpack that was underneath a bench right in front of the tower.

Then, at 12:58 AM, a 911 operator answered a call. Here's an actual recording of the 911 operator trying to contact the Atlanta Police Department Command Center. First, she got a busy signal.

Then, after three minutes, she finally got a dispatcher on the line. At the time of the games, many of the venues that had just been built specifically for the Olympics hadn't yet populated their way into the 911 database. So if you needed to look it up, it simply wasn't there. It didn't exist. No.

This is why information about the bomb threat never made it to law enforcement at the park, where Tom Davis and Richard Jewell were still trying to figure out what to do next. So I told Richard we would just follow our protocol, and the first step in that protocol was to try to determine if anybody in the immediate area owned the backpack. This was a very popular part of the park.

There was a show going on at the time and families would come, individuals would come and they would put lawn chairs out there. They would put spread blankets out there. It's just a real grassy knoll area right in front of the NBC tower. So we just started moving through that area, talking to people and asking them if they owned the backpack that was under the bench by the tower. And of course, no one claimed it. So after several minutes of doing that,

Shortly after 1:00 a.m., the diagnostic team, comprised of FBI and ATF agents, were dispatched to Tom and Richard's location. Here's Richard on 60 Minutes, recalling what happened when one of the ATF agents went to check out the bag.

He crawled under the bench and with his penlight he was laying flat on his stomach and he was undoing the top of the bag with his hand and all of a sudden he just froze and he tensed up and he just rolled out of the way. When he rolled out of the way, he jumped up and ran over to the other agents that were standing about 10 feet away. What really made me think, "Uh oh, this is bad."

is there was like a little line in training that they taught you and it was if you see an ATF agent running, you better be in front of him.

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You know, I was just a rookie. I was a rookie cop. And we graduated just in time for the Olympics. We were considered the Olympic class. So we're trying to rush classes through because, of course, the Olympics was the biggest sports event in the world. I fell into this cadence of 14-hour shifts, six days a week, one day off a week. Vince Velasquez recalls that late night in the park. Even though the clock had just passed midnight, the spectacle of the Olympics drew a staggering crowd of 15,000 individuals.

They celebrate the day's victories and champions, blissfully unaware of the backpack that had just been found. Vince himself was a few mere blocks away, and news of the discovery had not yet made its way through the police radio. I'm in uniform. I've got an orange traffic vest on because that's what we were required to wear. They wanted you to stand out. They wanted people to know that you were police. The weather was good, I recall. It was hot.

It was July, I remember that. And, you know, bulletproof vest under your, I mean, I'm just sweating bullets with a towel on my neck. I remember being worn out. There was a band playing. There were a lot of people. But I do remember a very friendly atmosphere. This is Mark McKay. He was a reporter for CNN Sports at the time.

I was day-to-day working an evening shift at that time. CNN had various sports programming, half-hour shows. So we were preparing the sportscast and then it started getting to be close to time to air.

Well, we weren't able to get into the Marietta Street entrance to where we needed to get across to our live shot because we didn't have the right credentials. So we basically were turned around and we ended up being on the perimeter of the park. My producer and I get on the other side of the AT&T Global Village stage and this explosion happens. We felt it. You could feel it in your chest. And I looked up and I could see the smoke coming above the stage.

I immediately thought, wow, that was a heck of a way to end the show. Pyrotechnics. Producers are good. My producer, Mike, said, no, I think something bad just happened. The pressure from the bomb knocked me on my ass, like literally pushed me backwards. It rattles your brain. I'm supposed to know what's going on, but I felt for a moment helpless. And then I hear screaming and people just screaming and running.

I tell you, the chaos was indescribable. I couldn't tell who was who. My gut told me something bad happened. Something intentional happened. It wasn't us, the good guys, that did this. It's a bad person. I remember vividly security guards at one of the entrances to the park basically just telling people to get out, get out, get out, get out.

So I make my way to the live shot location. Now the camera and the lights were already set up to go live anyway. I get to the top of the platform and put my earpiece in, and I'm told we're going to have CNN breaking news. Hello, everyone. I'm Andrea Zynga at the CNN Center in Atlanta. We have had word now of an explosion at the Centennial Olympic Park. We're going to go now to Mark McKay, who is live at Nike Park. Mark, thank you.

Hello, Mark. Our location is just north of the Centennial Olympic Park. In the vicinity of about 10 minutes ago, there was a loud, very concussive explosion that occurred... I contacted the command post and let them know that we had an explosion and that we needed help. I looked around and there was a lot of screaming, a lot of people that had been injured. And we just started trying to deal with the injuries at that point.

They were about to start a new song and bam, you know, just a really loud noise. And then we saw people bleeding. There was steel hitting people. We were rushing people to medical. It was a regular news day. I literally was getting ready to go to bed when my phone rings and says, you've got to come back to the station. A bomb's gone off in Centennial Olympic Park.

We're going right now to Mark Engel. Mark, what can you tell us? What have you seen? Who have you talked to? What happened? Well, Monica, from what I understand from witnesses who have been interviewed here so far, a sound tower, that's where the explosion occurred. We had a lot of people say earlier that they thought when the explosion occurred, it was part of the music. I mean, in today's rock and roll era, you have smoke and flames. It was just...

It was just crazy. That's the only way to describe it. It was something you see in movies, but you never expect to see in your town, particularly during an event where everybody in the world is watching your city and watching what's happening during the Olympics. It was definitely—it just took your breath away. When the bomb went off, the GBI—that's the Georgia Bureau of Investigation—

swiftly jumped in. Retired agent Charles Stone remembers arriving on scene. I heard one of my people on the radio call in saying there's been a bomb at Centennial Olympic Park. We have multiple officers there. So we jumped in my car and we got there relatively quickly and, you know, there were casualties everywhere.

I remember an explosion. I remember seeing my mother turn to a complete 360, which is probably going to be the most lasting memory out of all of that. This is Fallon Stubbs speaking to CNN in 2001. At the time of the bombing, she was just 14 years old. Fallon was attending the games with her mother, Alice Hawthorne. I saw my mother on the ground. I got up and I ran to try to find her help, try to find her anybody.

Some people told me to lay down, get down, get down. And I was like, "Wait, my mother." And all I could remember was looking over and I saw her. And I saw like 20 people around her, a lot of people, I guess, trying to resuscitate her. Fallon also sustained injuries in the bombing. Hers were not life-threatening. But sadly, her mother, who had been struck by shrapnel, was killed by the bomb. Alice Hawthorne was 44 years old.

All told, there were 111 injuries and one death as a direct result of the explosion. Lately, we've become strangely desensitized to these sorts of horrific events, with the mass shooting nearly every day. But this one's always stuck to me. And every time there's another mass casualty, it brings me right back here, asking the same questions everybody was asking that summer. How could someone do that? And why? How does a person get to that point?

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By daybreak, the news was global.

and the Centennial Olympic bombing was a national security concern. President Clinton addressed the nation in a White House press briefing. The bombing at Centennial Olympic Park this morning was an evil act of terror, an act of cowardice that stands in sharp contrast to the courage of the Olympic athletes. I want to make clear our common determination. We will spare no effort to find out who was responsible for this murderous act. We will track them down. We will bring them to justice.

we will see that they are punished. Let me say finally that an act of vicious terror like this is clearly directed at the spirit of our own democracy. It seeks to rip also at the spirit of the Olympics. But we must not let these attacks stop us from going forward. We cannot let terror win. That is not the American way. With increased security and tributes to the victims, the games would continue with only a few events delayed.

As President Clinton thanked the security personnel, the media took it a step further and crowned a hero, security guard Richard Jewell, who saved countless lives when he found and reported the abandoned bag. It was a pretty glorious time for him.

I was excited and even a little honored to meet him because I'd heard he was the one who found the bomb. It was so clear that had that bomb not been identified early on and spectators hadn't been pushed away by the hundreds, that there would have been massive casualties. So I just shook his hand and said, thank you. He was saying, I'm just doing my job. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time and did the job that I was trained to do.

The only thing I wish we could have done was got everybody out of the area. I feel for the victims and their families. And I mean, this is the Olympics. It's supposed to be a time of joy for the world. And it's a very, very bad thing. While the events were tragic, the outcome could have been much worse.

In addition to Richard Jewell's quick actions, there was another group of unsuspecting heroes. A group of young men coming from the Speedo tent slightly moved the backpack containing the bomb. The FBI would later name this group the Speedo Boys. According to Agent Charles Stone, the shifting of the bag made a huge difference. When they first saw the pack, they thought it had sound equipment in it. They nudged it.

Local, state, and federal authorities worked around the clock to identify who was responsible for the bombing.

combing through hours of tape, thousands of pieces of evidence, and interviewing hundreds of witnesses, including multiple interviews with Richard Jewell. He was the hero for three days. Then, on July 30th, the day Centennial Park reopened to the public, local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, named Jewell as a suspect, citing an unnamed source, who was later revealed to be an FBI agent.

Well, just moments ago, the FBI went up the steps to Jule's apartment, which is on the second floor of this building behind me. They did not identify themselves to reporters, but at the door we heard them identify themselves as FBI agents to Jule. Mr. Jule has been fully cooperative and permitted the agents to enter the apartment and conduct the court-authorized search. Since Saturday, the FBI has questioned him five times. They're very thorough.

They will do whatever it takes to catch who did it, and I will assist them in any way I can. The speculation is that the FBI is close to making the case in their language. They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still some holes in this case. Unbeknownst to Jewell, the FBI had been surveilling him, and it was his behavior that stood out. Did he act? Of course. We did a lot of background on him.

He had made statements that if anything happened at the Olympics, he wanted to be in the middle of it. Which immediately brought back the bomb tech from LAPD, who put down a fake bomb. Charles is talking about something that happened at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Officer James W. Pearson of the LAPD discovered and defused a bomb found on a bus that was seemingly intended for Turkish Olympic athletes. Days later, after failing a lie detector test...

Pearson admitted to placing the bomb on the bus himself in an effort to appear as a hero to the media and his peers. Richard Jewell was suspected of pulling the same stunt. With us now is Richard Jewell. The day started with Katie Couric hailing Richard Jewell a savior. But by the end of the day, Jewell was a possible suspect. Did he crave the limelight? After the bombing, Jewell approached the network seeking publicity.

A sign, psychiatrists say, of the hero syndrome. For good reason, the Centennial Olympic Games had to go on. But for that to happen, the public needed to feel safe. They needed to believe that they were in good hands, that the FBI was in control. By marking Jewell as the prime suspect, the FBI was carefully indicating that not only did they have their guy, but also there was no threat of additional attacks. ♪

I did do a story on the reopening of the park, which became a celebration with music and prayer and a resilience and a promise that this was not going to stop the Atlanta Olympics from continuing. I think it's great. The park belongs to us.

and we can't blame anybody to take it away from us. I'll be watching for a package that's unattended. I'm wanting to see everybody get back in there and really prove to the guys that did this that they can't defeat us, that we're really able to overcome this and to move on. They want to show this person, these people, whoever did this was not going to stop the spirit of the Olympics. Having a suspect who could quickly and neatly be found guilty in the court of public opinion

It soundly checked both boxes. And this wasn't some cynical charade manufactured to keep Atlanta open for business. The FBI really did think they'd crack the case. They really did think they had their guy. Once the forensics were done, once everything was wrapped up on the investigative side by the authorities, they indeed opened the park and they weren't afraid to come back in. And they poured back in. I remember there was dignitaries, prayers for the victims,

And then people came back and they continued to celebrate the 96 games. On August 4th, 1996, the Centennial Games concluded. No further incidents impacted the games that summer.

I remember where I was.

This is Leah Lance, one of the many who felt the ripple effects of the bomb. I was downtown hanging out with some friends at the House of Blues, which is across the street from Centennial Park. I was really relieved that I'd made it home and left early and wasn't there when that happened. That night was a close call for me, but it was the next bomb. That's the one that changed my life.

Heat Tree Industrial Boulevard. Star 94, it's 935, and we go to Rob Stadler, our news director, with a breaking news story. Steve, I am at 275 Carpenter Drive. This is a three-story building that parallels Roswell Road. It's right behind Good Old Days in Sandy Springs, where a suspected bomb has gone off in this building. Flashpoint is a production of Tenderfoot TV, in association with iHeartMedia. I'm your host, Cole Acasio.

Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint was created, written, and executive produced by Doug Matica and myself on behalf of 7997. Lead producer is Alex Vespestad, along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stedman. Our associate producer is Whit Lacascio. Editing by Alex Vespestad, with additional editing by Liam Luxon and Sydney Evans. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan.

Thanks for listening.

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