Ceremony to recognize Jewell, law enforcement

Security guard hailed as hero in bombing at ’96 Olympic site.

More than 25 years after Richard Jewell’s quick thinking alerted authorities to the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, the heroic security guard will be honored along with law enforcement officers who responded to the attack.

At 11 a.m. today, the Georgia World Congress Center Authority will host a dedication ceremony at the Quilt of Remembrance, a park memorial already honoring the two people who died and 111 who were injured as a result of the bombing.

“Please join Georgia World Congress Center Authority for a dedication ceremony commemorating Richard Jewell and the law enforcement community for their bravery, vigilance and commitment to protecting the public on July 27, 1996,” an event announcement said.

Jewell, the subject of a book and movie about the incident, saved countless lives only to have his own life turned upside down. His alerted authorities to the suspicious knapsack that held a bomb, helped evacuate the area and quickly earned national acclaim for his bravery.

Days later, he became the FBI’S chief suspect, as The Atlanta Journal-constitution and other media outlets reported. Jewell was cleared after 88 days and confessed serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph is serving multiple life sentences.

The AJC was among the media outlets sued after Jewell was exonerated, and the only one that didn’t settle. Litigation naming the AJC was dismissed in 2011, when the Georgia Court of Appeals concluded “the articles in their entirety were substantially true at the time they were published.” Jewell died in 2007 at the age of 44.

In 2019, the story of the bombing and Jewell hit the big screen in “Richard Jewell,” a movie directed by Clint Eastwood.

Eastwood and cast members Paul Walter Hauser (who starred in the title role), Jon Hamm, Kathy Bates and Sam Rockwell attended the film’s Atlanta premiere in December 2019 at the Rialto Center for the Arts.

Bobi Jewell, the security guard’s mother, joined the entertainers on stage.

“I would like to thank everyone for coming out tonight on Clint’s behalf,” she said that night. “I’m a Jewell but he is also.”

Bates earned a Golden Globe nomination for her role as Bobi Jewell.

“This film is the story of an unsung American hero,” Georgia House Speaker David Ralston said the night of the Atlanta premiere. “Richard Jewell should be a name we celebrate here in Atlanta and in Georgia.”

Ralston noted at the time that a Centennial Olympic Park ceremony to honor Jewell was coming up; it was postponed, like many gatherings, due to the pandemic.

“The Suspect,” authored by Kent Alexander, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia during the time of the bombing, and journalist Kevin Salwen, was published about a month before the movie premiered.

“We didn’t write this book as an ethics lesson or as a work of moralizing,” Salwen told the AJC in a 2019 interview. “We wrote this book as a work of narrative nonfiction to tell the story of an unsung hero, a man who deserves a statue in the city of Atlanta, and the case that brought him down.”