Federal prosecutors cleared Richard Jewell as a suspect in the Olympic park bombing on Saturday, ending a three-month ordeal that saw the security guard go from hero to suspected terrorist overnight.
"Based on evidence developed to date, your client Richard Jewell is not considered a target of the federal criminal investigation into the bombing. . . . Barring any newly discovered evidence, this status will not change," U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander said in a letter to Jewell's lawyer."We are overjoyed," said attorney Jack Martin. "It says what we have known all along - that he is no longer a suspect in the bombing."
Jewell - who repeatedly maintained his innocence and was never charged - has not worked since he was identified as a suspect and now hopes to put back the pieces of his life.
"The first step was a long process," Jewell said to reporters at his apartment. He told them he would have more to say at a news conference Monday, leaving them with a hometown World Series cheer, "Go, Braves!"
No one else has been publicly identified as a suspect in the July 27 bombing at Olympic Centennial Park that killed one and injured more than 100.
Alexander said the attention on Jewell was "highly unusual and intense," but he did not apologize in the letter. The government has apologized only twice in recent history, both in cases where people had been formally charged.
"This is the way the government apologizes," said Lin Wood, another lawyer for Jewell. "I view this letter as the government's apology to Richard Jewell."
Wood said Jewell's lawyers would continue to pursue defamation lawsuits against news organizations that reported he was a suspect, "and it's a good possibility that we will down the road institute legal action against members of the FBI."
Wayne Grant, another attorney for Jewell, said a lawsuit would be filed against the first news organization to identify Jewell as a suspect, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and NBC for comments made by anchor Tom Brokaw.
Ron Martin, editor of the Journal-Constitution, declined comment, as did NBC News spokeswoman Lynn Gardner.
In a CBS "60 Minutes" interview broadcast last month, Wood accused Brokaw of insinuating that Jewell was guilty by saying: "Look, they probably got enough to arrest him. They probably have got enough to try him."'
Brokaw, in the interview, emphasized that he finished his on-air remarks by saying: "Everyone, please understand absolutely he is only the focus of this investigation - he is not even a suspect yet."
The beefy, mustachioed Jewell had been working as a private security guard in the park when the pipe bomb exploded. He was initially hailed as a hero for alerting police to an unattended, olive knapsack and for helping clear people away.
But the knapsack exploded in a hail of nails before the evacuation was complete.
Three days later, The Journal-Constitution quoted anonymous sources who identified Jewell, 33, as a prime suspect. Those sources have never been revealed.
"I'm innocent. I didn't do it," Jewell said the next day to reporters who mobbed him as he returned home from yet another round of FBI questioning.
Investigators apparently believed Jewell, who had a checkered career in police and security work, including an arrest for impersonating an officer, fit a common profile for a lone bomber: a former police officer, military man or aspiring policeman who seeks to become a hero.
FBI agents carted away a mountain of material from the apartment he shares with his mother, and his former home, a dilapidated cabin on a hill in northeastern Georgia.
Agents also took hair samples and fingerprints, but Jewell declined to give a voice recording investigators had sought to see if his voice matched that of a 911 call made minutes before the bombing.
Jewell's attorneys had said he could not have made the call because it was made from three blocks away within a minute of the time he was seen in the park by witnesses.
"This is a good, polite and decent man who did his job the night of the Olympic park bombing, and unfortunately, because he did his job and did it correctly, he was branded unfairly as a criminal," Wood said Saturday. "He's not a criminal. He's a good man."
A month after the bombing, Jewell's mother appealed to President Clinton to clear her son. Attorney General Janet Reno said she sympathized but refused to comment on Jewell's status as a suspect.
"Unfortunately, criminal investigations often intrude upon the lives of private citizens like Mr. Jewell and his mother," Alexander said in a statement.