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The first specific tip about Jewell came on July 27, the day of the bombing, in a phone call from Ray Cleere, the president of Piedmont College in Georgia, where Jewell had worked as a security guard until last May. Cleere said he had seen Jewell on television being acclaimed as a hero. Cleere wanted to tell the FBI that Jewell had been "a little erratic," "almost too excitable" and too gung-ho about "energetic police work."
In the next few days, FBI investigators set about gathering more information on Jewell while also pursuing other leads. Among the early allegations cited in government documents are the following: Jewell wondered aloud whether the tower he was guarding could withstand a bomb blast; a neighbor at Jewell's country cabin said he had heard a loud explosion, seen a large cloud of smoke rising from the woods and then seen Jewell at the edge of the woods, looking "very nervous"; Jewell had told co-workers, "You better take a picture of me now because I'm going to be famous"; Jewell, as a deputy sheriff in Habersham County, owned an olive-drab military-style knapsack very much like the one that contained the bomb, yet he denied this to the FBI; also, as a Habersham County deputy, Jewell had received some training about bombs, particularly pipe bombs; Jewell, who never took breaks, had left his post between 10:00 and 10:15 on the night of the bombing.
Was this information "too thin" to support a search warrant, as Jewell's lawyers claim? Not according to some experts, who note that investigators must only show "probable cause" that evidence is present to get a warrant. Yet Jewell's lawyers energetically maintain that none of these items were true. The backpack? Jewell never owned one. "He had a green knapsack he took to work every day, and they took that," says lawyer L. Lin Wood. The explosion? "Richard doesn't have a clue what they are talking about, except that he burns trash, and it could have been an aerosol can," says Wood. He points out that a government memorandum states that investigators could find no metal fragments near where the explosion supposedly took place. The boast "I'm going to be famous"? The government memorandum says the colleagues who allegedly heard this comment are still being sought, and Wood is convinced that whoever mentioned it heard about it secondhand. Taking a break? Jewell was going to the bathroom.
According to Samuel Gross, a professor of criminal procedure at Michigan Law School, "there's a point at which an open investigation of who committed a crime becomes instead the prosecution of suspect X. If that happens early on in the case, the chances of making a mistake are very great." In the Atlanta bombing, the shift from an open investigation to the prosecution of a particular suspect does seem to have taken place very early, and the result was certainly a mistake.