For five hours, Richard Jewell sat glumly on the step to his apartment, watching federal agents cart away his worldly goods. Eighty miles away, agents picked through a rented storage shed and his previous home, a secluded cabin overlooking the Chattahoochee River.
By early Thursday, authorities had not said whether they had found evidence indicating that the "hero" of Saturday's attack on Centennial Olympic Park could be the same person who left a timed pipe bomb in the midst of a festive crowd."We are continuing and we are going to find out who did this," FBI spokeswoman Joyce Dean said late Wednesday, after agents spent a day exploring the most minute physical details of Jewell's life.
Two federal officials in Washington, insisting on anonymity, suggested that investigators' interest in Jewell was diminishing somewhat.
"We are somewhat less suspicious of him, in part because a couple of people have come forward and modified what they said about him before," one official said.
But Dean said it was premature to conclude that the FBI was losing interest in Jewell, a 33-year-old security guard who pointed out a suspicious knapsack to police minutes before a bomb inside exploded.
Jewell's action gave officers time to move back some people who had been near the knapsack, likely lessening the number of victims. One woman, Alice Hawthorne, died and 111 people were injured.
Jewell was lionized as a hero - a role he embraced enthusiastically, though with "aw, shucks" modesty. Since Tuesday, when it became apparent that he was a prime target of the FBI investigation, his life has turned upside down.
"I think like most decent people, Richard is humiliated and embarrassed, not so much for himself, but for all the problems it has caused his mother and other family members," Jewell's lawyer, Watson Bryant, said Thursday on NBC's "Today" show. "This kind of attention nobody needs."
FBI officials here have maintained all along that Jewell was only one of many people being investigated. But a federal law enforcement source in Washington described him Tuesday as the "leading candidate" at that point in the investigation.
The scene Wednesday at his apartment, in a low-slung brick building on a busy four-lane road, was surreal.
As more than 100 reporters and photographers from around the world watched from the parking lot and Jewell watched from the steps, agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms trooped in and out of his apartment.
They brought in a police dog. They brought out boxes, among them a military ammunition box. They also impounded a plastic bag filled with laundry.
Meanwhile, on a hill overlooking the Chattahoochee in northeastern Georgia, more agents and dogs pored over the property where Jewell had lived while working as a security guard at nearby Piedmont College.
The agents seemed primarily interested in a blue cement shed, about 6 feet by 10 feet, near a dilapidated wooden cabin. They also inspected a 55-gallon drum.
By late evening the agents had left, leaving only a van belonging to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Two agents worked at the back of the van, apparently conducting chemical tests.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Neighbor is charged
A neighbor of the woman killed in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing has been charged with burglarizing her Albany, Ga., home the day after she died. Welton Burden, 34, was arrested Wednesday night when the car he was riding in was pulled over on a routine traffic stop, police said. Police had issued a warrant for Burden after they learned he had told others details about the burglary that were not public.