There are Olympic moments that are flash-frozen in time, etched sharply and indelibly. But one moment at the Atlanta Games has remained elusive and blurry, a shaky home movie that no one can bring into focus.
After a week of investigation, it appears that only one person may truly know what happened in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park in the early hours of Saturday, July 27.Whoever he is, he has done his talking in a call to 911: "There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes."
What happened in those 30 minutes and, perhaps more importantly, the 10 or 15 minutes before them, is the key to cracking a mystery that has thus far stymied hundreds of the federal government's best investigators.
For much of the past week, federal agents have focused their attention on Richard Jewell, a 33-year-old security guard who was apparently the first to spot an unattended knapsack containing a triple-barrel pipe bomb encrusted with nails.
Lionized as a hero in the days immediately after the bombing, Jew-ell eventually fell under suspicion for several reasons. Investigators routinely consider the possi-bility that the person closest to a crime - the spouse of a murder victim, the parent of an abused child - might be the perpetrator. They also know that police officers have been known to create crimes in order to "solve" them.
In Jewell's case, they apparently were nudged by a former employer, Piedmont College, whose officials recalled the enthusiastic guard predicting that he'd be a hero at the Olympics.
Agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms spent much of the week rooting through Jewell's belongings, impounding box after box of possessions from his Atlanta apartment and from a cabin and shed he used when he worked at Piedmont, in northeastern Georgia.
They also undoubtedly spent many hours trying to create a chronology of the crime, to dissect and reassemble the 40 or so minutes that led up to the bombing and the crucial minutes that followed.
Publicly, the FBI has said little. But a few things are known about the time surrounding the explosion, which left one person dead and 111 injured.
The bombing took place near the stage at the AT&T Global Olympic Village, one of many corporate pavilions in the 21-acre park. A Los Angeles R&B band, Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, was playing that night, as it had for several nights previous. Band members had become friendly with Jewell - "a good ol' Southern boy," recalled keyboard player John Paruolo - and had given him a copy of their latest CD, "Jack It Up."
Jewell, who was employed by a Southern California security firm under contract to AT&T, was posted near the "mix tower," where sound and lighting engineers helped produce the stage show. Because it is televising the Olympics, NBC and its affiliate stations had camera crews there.
Here is what is known about some pertinent times:
12:15 a.m.: NBC cameraman Max Schindler Jr. takes a break. When he returns a little while later - exactly when is unclear - he notices Jewell is gone from his post. He estimates that Jewell is gone for about 20 minutes. "He said he had to go to the restroom," recalled Schindler, who considered the disappearance odd.
12:38 to 12:45 a.m.: Jewell is at his post. This is known, according to a federal official in Washington, because investigators have film from that period in which the security guard can be seen.
12:43 a.m.: KNBC, the NBC station in Los Angeles, goes on the air with a live report from its weatherman, standing near the AT&T stage. A few minutes afterward, an NBC technician on the shoot, Ron Liedelmeyer, sees Jewell and a police officer gesturing toward something on the ground. Jewell approaches Liedelmeyer and tells him the package "doesn't look good." It is now presumably around 12:50 a.m.
12:58 a.m.: A 911 operator takes a call from a man who sounds as if he is a white American with no discernible accent. (Jewell has a strong Southern accent.) The man issues the warning about the bomb. The call is traced to a pay telephone at a Day's Inn hotel about three blocks from the AT&T stage. The 911 operator waits 10 minutes, then sends a police officer to the pay phone.
1 a.m.: Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, which had taken a break after an earlier set, begins playing. At some point, police summon a bomb evaluation team and begin quietly telling people around the mix tower to leave. Just before 1:25 a.m., the band finishes the song, "I Walk Alone" and begins to introduce its next song, "It's a Woman's Thing," dedicated to women Olympians.
1:25 a.m.: The bomb explodes, sending a blizzard of nails and shrapnel into the crowd, which has been pushed back 40 or more feet from the knapsack. Chaos ensues. A few minutes later, a record producer, Bill Wray, sees Jewell behind the mix tower, keeping people away - as one might expect a security guard to do.
Among the questions that remain unanswered: What was Jewell doing during the time that Schindler reported him missing? Did he have time to walk to the Day's Inn, about 5 minutes from the park, in time for the 911 call? Could he disguise a Southern accent? Did anyone see him between the last time that Liedelmeyer saw him, around 12:50 a.m., and when Wray saw him, at around 1:30 a.m.?
At this point, anyone who might know isn't talking. And so the investigation continues, with a prime suspect, a mountain of potential evidence, lots of questions, few answers and no arrest.