‘Everything’s changed,’ hero says 20 years after Olympic bombing

The job had been a walk in the park for Tom Davis until he was thrust into the biggest case of his GBI career.

Davis, an agent working out of the Milledgeville office, was assigned to protect Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 games in Atlanta.

After a 16-hour day, he should have already called it a night when he took one last stroll through the throngs of people about 1 a.m. on July 27, 1996.

Security guard Richard Jewell asked for his help dispersing rowdy revelers throwing beer cans near a media tower.

Davis had met Jewell a few days before and thought he was a “nice guy.”

Jewell noticed a backpack under a bench near the tower and assumed one of the can-throwers had left it behind as they scattered into the crowd.

Earlier that week, Davis already encountered several other suspicious packages in the park that turned out to be false alarms.

“To me, this one wasn’t any different,” Davis said. “I thought it would be the same.”

Jewell, whom Davis described as an “overzealous type person,” asked how Davis wanted to handle the situation.

Davis calmly called in FBI and ATF agents to take a closer look.

After one of them crawled back slowly from the pack, he used Davis’ satellite phone to call in the “render safe” explosives team from Dobbins Air Force Base.

As a precaution, they started evacuating the area near the tower and a grassy knoll where folks were sitting and enjoying music.

Davis was only 2 or 3 yards away from the backpack when he was knocked to the ground in a loud blast.

“When the explosion just occurs, it rattles you. None of us knew that was a bomb. It’s overwhelming for the first few seconds,” said Davis, 57, who retired a few years ago after 31 years.

More than 100 people were wounded all around him. Amid screams and cries, others ran for safety in the chaos.

“The force is what I remember more than anything, and the heat. It forced me completely down and it was just a tremendous blast.”

While some people were helping a man bleeding heavily from his torso, Davis tried to assist a woman lying near him.

“I remember leaning down and touching her, trying to get a pulse,” he said.

There was none.

Alice Hawthorne, a 44-year-old ice cream shop owner from Albany, was the only person killed in the blast.

A Turkish cameraman suffered a fatal heart attack on the way to the scene.

Around the world, news anchors brought shocking news of an attack at the Olympics.

“Early on we had no idea who was involved and what their motive was,” Davis said. “If it happened today in today’s world, you would expect it a little bit more because in this country everything’s changed.”

Baldwin County Sheriff Bill Massee was watching the news closely as he had assigned nearly a dozen of his officers to work the games.

“It would be the only Olympics in Georgia in their lifetime, and it would be the only one they could see up close,” Massee said.

When he learned of the bomb, he initially thought some foreign terrorist had put it there.

“It was 20 years ago and the thought that an American would put a bomb in a park with families and children, that was out of our thinking,” Massee said. “It just went against our thinking that we would attack ourselves.”

A couple days later, Jewell was identified as a suspect, only to be cleared a few months later.

The investigation led to Eric Robert Rudolph, an anti-abortionist who became one of the FBI’s “most wanted” criminals after a few other bombings in Atlanta and Birmingham.

In his statement at sentencing, Rudolph said he intended to knock out the power grid and shut down the whole Olympics “to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.”

Shortly after the Olympic bombing, Massee and Monroe County Sheriff John Cary Bittick were called to head the new security checkpoints at the park.

In the months leading up to the Olympics, the security force had asked that metal detectors be placed at the park, but the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games wanted the venue to be open, with no long lines, Davis said.

“The state did a phenomenal job with security,” Massee said. “Nobody had any idea somebody like Eric Rudolph would plant a bomb in the only open Olympic venue, which was the park, which was open to children and families.”

Using officers from around the state, Massee and Bittick ran the detail for the duration of the games.

“They did a tremendous job,” Davis said. “You couldn’t have picked better sheriffs to do that. They had a wide range of experience.”

Massee had been part of an exchange to Israel to learn enhanced security techniques the year before.

Every day from 6 a.m. until the wee hours of the next morning, the officers checked each person coming into the park.

The delays and long lines led Olympic officials to ask that the magnetometer be adjusted so as not to be so sensitive, but Bittick and Massee refused.

“We’re very sorry about the delay, but we’re not going to lighten up any of the security,” Massee told them.

The rest of the week, Massee enjoyed bumping into old friends and acquaintances who visited the park.

Middle Georgians stopped them to offer their thanks.

“I’m glad to see our sheriffs up here that we see on television and feel like we know,” he remembered hearing.

At the time, no one knew Rudolph actually was targeting public safety officers who were keeping the peace.

In revealing his initial plot that included multiple blasts over several days, Rudolph planned to give a 40- to 50-minute warning each time.

“My intent was to thereby allow each area to be cleared, leaving only uniformed, arms-carrying government personnel exposed to potential injury,” Rudolph’s statement read.

Atlanta 911 operators received an anonymous warning on the night of the explosion, but the message hadn’t gotten to Davis.

“Had we gotten that call, I’m not saying we could have saved that lady’s life, but there would have been a greater urgency,” he said.

Davis actually was closer to the explosion than Hawthorne.

“I didn’t even know I’d been hit. I’d been through all the interviews and we were up all night long,” Davis said.

When he finally got back to his relative’s house, he reached to remove his credentials from his back pocket.

Something sharp caught his finger — a piece of shrapnel embedded in his badge case.

He suffers from hearing loss and now is startled by loud noises, his wife, Jane, said.

A commemorative brick sits on the back porch of his home on Lake Sinclair.

The gift is a replica of a marker in the park that reads: “Tom Davis 1996 Cent. Park Hero.”

“He doesn’t like to call himself a hero,” Jane Davis said. “But what he did made a difference.”

This story was originally published July 23, 2016 at 1:00 PM with the headline "‘Everything’s changed,’ hero says 20 years after Olympic bombing."