Wednesday marks 20 years since Centennial Olympic Park bombing

ATLANTA — July 27 is a day that many in Atlanta will remember forever.

Eric Robert Rudolph placed three homemade pipe bombs underneath a bench at Centennial Olympic Park during a celebration concert on July 27, 1996.

Security guard Richard Jewell discovered the bombs, alerted officers and began clearing the area. The bombs detonated before all the spectators could leave the area, killing two people and injuring 100 others.

Alice Hawthorne, 44, of Albany, Georgia, was killed in the explosion, and a Turkish photographer, Melih Uzunyol, suffered a fatal heart attack while running to the scene.

“It was chaotic,” said GBI agent Tom Davis, who was hit by a piece of shrapnel. “It was just a huge explosion, a very loud explosion and a lot of heat. It forced me to the ground. I just saw people (lying) everywhere, many of them screaming and hurt severely.”

Channel 2’s Mark McKay was at Centennial Olympic Park covering the games when the bomb went off.

"My first instinct was 'Wow, pyrotechnics. That's a heck of a way to end the show,’” McKay said. "My producer knew otherwise.  He told me to go to the live shot location and he was going to go in as far as he could get."

McKay also remembers the producer telling him that "something bad just happened."

"I felt it throughout my whole body," McKay said. "If you look back at what I reported, I said it was a concussive explosion where you felt it in your chest.”

Memories of the games are tinged by off-the-field mayhem created by the bombing. Instead of a celebration of international unity through sports, the focus turned to investigations. The Olympics went on, but with a less celebratory and more somber mood.

Rudolph was arrested seven years later as he was scrounging for food behind a discount supermarket in a small North Carolina town.

“It changed everything as far as how the Olympics went,” said Davis, an assistant venue commander for the games. “It was a great time for the city of Atlanta, and then when the bomb happened, it changed the whole atmosphere. It was shocking that we had something like that.”

After talking with International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch, officials decided to increase security and temporarily shut down Centennial Olympic Park, but to continue the games.

McKay said that, despite the lone terrorist and the horror of the night, what remains with him is not the blast, but its aftermath.

"I think the resiliency of the city, the resiliency of the Olympic movement," he said. "I choose to remember that. That after it was over, people came back to the park in masses."

"It speaks, overall, to how Atlanta handled those games."

Rudolph pleaded guilty in 2005 to a series of bombings at Centennial Olympic Park, a lesbian bar in Atlanta and abortion clinics in Sandy Springs and Birmingham, Alabama. He said in a statement that the Olympics bombing was meant to embarrass the United States government for sanctioning abortion.

He’s serving four life sentences in a supermax federal prison near Florence, Colorado.

Cox Media Group