Law officers' quick thinking may have averted more tragedy
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July 27, 1996
Web posted at: 10:20 p.m. EDT
ATLANTA (CNN) -- For Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Tom Davis, it seemed like a routine call when he was summoned to Centennial Olympic Park late Saturday to round up some rowdy revelers.
By the time he arrived, the partiers were gone. But a security guard pointed him to a new problem: a green knapsack sitting unattended under a nearby bench.
About 20 minutes later, as Davis tried to steer people away from the abandoned bag, it blew up, killing one visitor and injuring more than 100. A Turkish cameraman died of a heart attack while covering the explosion. Suddenly, a place for celebration became one filled with terror and chaos.
The blast was the worst attack on an Olympic Games since 11 Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian guerrillas at the 1972 Games in Munich.
"We had a lot of people on the ground screaming and a lot of people in pain and severely injured," said Davis, a 15-year GBI veteran and father of two sons. "I started thinking about my kids."
Davis said that when he found the bag, he was unaware that a warning call had been made to 911 emergency dispatchers, but his instincts made him wary of a bag no one would claim.
He started the standard practice for law officers who have found suspicious packages during these games: calling a bomb diagnostic team and, as other officers joined him, trying to keep people away from the area. (123K AIFF or WAV sound)
Steve Blackwell was one of the officers who tried to move the crowd away from the bag. He tried to be tactful: "I didn't want to say we had a bomb. That would have created a panic."
Still, the 33-year-old admitted, "If I told you I wasn't scared, I'd be lying. I kept thinking, 'I hope we can get this thing safe without anybody getting hurt.'"
That, however, was not to be.
"After we did an assessment of the situation," Davis said, "the explosion occurred -- just a powerful, tremendous explosion. I do not know how to explain it other than that."
All the officers were injured except Davis, although none were hospitalized. Davis, 37, was hit in the buttocks by shrapnel. (235K AIFF or WAV sound)
Blackwell was left with a limp from small pieces of shrapnel in his right leg. But he met a friend in the emergency room: his wife, Wendy, a nurse at Georgia Baptist Medical Center.
And, even as the officers' actions were met with unstinting praise, they saw it in a slightly different light.
"I'm not a hero. I'm a state police officer. I had a job to do and I did it," Blackwell said. "I wish nobody had gotten hurt. I wish nobody had died. I think we did the best we could."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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