There is a new movie coming out in the next few weeks titled “Richard Jewell”. The film is directed by Clint Eastwood and I like Clint both as an actor and a director. I have seen some previews of the film and one of the things I noted was that the main character displayed some Aspie traits such as:
* Adults with Aspergers tend to be trusting of others, even charmingly naïve.
* They often have an inability to deceive or to understand deception.
* They are often direct, speak their mind and are honest.
* They have a child-like imagination.
So perhaps the first question it ask is who is Richard Jewell? (This is probably important because many of you were not even born before 1996.)
According to Wikipedia:
Richard Jewell was an American police officer and security guard. While working as a security guard for AT&T, he became known in connection with the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. The bombing was a domestic terrorist pipe bombing attack on the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 27 during the 1996 Summer Olympics. The blast directly killed 1 person [Alice Hawthorne] and injured 111 others. Another person Melih Uzunyol, a Turkish cameraman, who ran to the scene following the blast, died of a heart attack. . After he discovered a backpack filled with three pipe bombs on the park grounds, Jewell alerted police and helped to evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, saving many people from injury or death. Initially he was hailed by the media as a hero, but then almost overnight turned into a villain and was then considered a suspect.
The type of bomb used should be noted. What was not known outside a small circle of investigators was how deadly the Centennial Park bomb really was. It was well constructed, with a piece of metal shaped like a V, and inside, it had canisters filled with nails and screws. Jack Martin, who had spent time in Vietnam, compared its construction to that of a claymore mine, a sophisticated and lethal device. The bomb weighed more than 40 pounds. It was "a shaped charge," F.B.I. deputy director Weldon Kennedy would announce in December. It could blast out fragments from three separate canisters, but only one of the canisters exploded on July 27. Someone had moved the backpack slightly before the bomb detonated, causing most of the shrapnel to shoot into the sky. The composition of the bomb did not suggest the work of an amateur, Kathy Scruggs would ironically later report, after interviewing an A.T.F. chemist. [The point here is that if Richard did not spearhead the discovery and evacuation, hundreds of people would have been killed.]
Eventually the real culprit was identified and his name was Eric Rudolph. Rudolph is an American terrorist who spent five years on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list until he was caught in 2003.
Was Richard Jewell an Aspie?
Well to answer that question I searched for biographical information on Richard Jewell and came across the following source:
American Nightmare: The Ballad Of Richard Jewell which was published in Vanity Fair on February 1997
After reviewing the article, I am inclined to believe the answer is likely YES.
Taking excerpts from the article, this is what caught my attention:
Richard in High School, he was a military-history buff, he liked to talk about Napoleon and the Vietnam War and read books on both World Wars. In later life he was a former deputy who read the Georgia law code for fun in his spare time. One of the characteristics of Aspies is that they are
* proficient in knowledge categories of information (highly-focused interests)
* a remarkable ability for intense focus is a common trait, becoming an expert in a single object or topic to the exclusion of all others
Richard had few friends in high school. He was also unlucky in love. He presented one woman with an engagement ring, and later, in Habersham County, he would give another a large wooden key with a sign that read, THIS IS THE KEY TO UNLOCK YOUR HEART, but both relationships came apart. One of the characteristics of an Aspie is that despite a desire for friends, they have great difficulty in initiating or maintaining close relationships.
At approximately 10 P.M. on 26 July 1996, Richard went to report the trash and the group that was carousing, he spotted a large olive-green military style backpack, known as an Alice pack, under the bench. When he found the backpack he alerted Tom Davis [from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation]. "I was light about the package at first," At that point, it was not a concern. I was thinking to myself, Well, I am sure one of these people left it on the ground. When Davis came back and said, 'Nobody said it was theirs,' that is when the little hairs on the back of my head began to stand up. I thought, Uh-oh. This is not good. "I never really had time to be frightened. My law-enforcement background paid off here. What went through my head was like a computer screen of this list I had to do. I had to call my supervisor. I have to tell people in the tower that something was going on. I have to be firm with them, stay calm, and be professional." Almost immediately, Jewell and Tom cleared a 25-foot-square area around the backpack; Jewell made two trips into the tower to warn the technicians. "I want y'all out now. This is serious." This narrative describes a couple of other Aspie traits. These are:
* Adults with Aspergers are especially good at noting and recalling details.
* Adult Aspies can be calm in a crisis.
Richard Jewell described himself as methodical. "I am the kind of person who plans everything. I like to go from A to B to C to D. One of the traits of an Aspie is obsessed with order (an innate need to make order out of apparent chaos).
On TV his face was described as having a porcine blankness; he appeared suspicious. In person, Jewell has a hard time disguising his emotions. Aspies are described as struggling to make eye contact, which implies to many NTs that they are hiding something.
Aspies many times project the wrong image. Richard Jewell recalled after the media began their attack feeling anger when he read descriptions of himself as a child-man, a mama's boy, and "a wannabe policeman." Jewell was perceived in the public imagination as a hapless dummy, a plodding misfit, a Forrest Gump. [Forest Gump is a film that the Autism Research Institute considers containing an autistic character. In actual fact, ‘Forrest Gump‘ was based on a book of the same name by Winston Groom (1986) in which the title character is an autistic savant with great mathematical ability!] He was also described as a 34-year-old guy living with his mother. In school many Aspies are bullied. They are often told they are stupid, worthless, an idiot. Many Aspies even at the age of 34 years old live with their parents.
One time when Richard was demoted for wreaking his patrol car, he was demoted to working in the jail. Rick Moore, a local deputy, advised him to accept the job, but Jewell despised the jailhouse atmosphere. He told me, "It was a small room filled with cigarette smoke. I couldn't take it." He resigned. One of the attributes of an Aspie is a hypersensitivity to the senses.
And finally, when an Aspie returns home from school or work, many retreat into a fantasy world by playing video games to relieve the stress and of the day and wind down. When Richard Jewell was experiencing extreme stress from the media attacks, he retreated to a spare bedroom in his mother's apartment and played a computer game called “Defender”.
There is one other fine point that I think many may have missed. Richard was the boy who helped the teachers and worked as a school crossing guard. I remember when I was in Junior High School that I was chosen to be a crossing guard. I suspect they chose me because they knew that I would execute the task with great diligence. I also remember the names my peer group called me as a result – teacher’s pet.
I suspect Richard used his experience as a crossing guard as a springboard into the field of law enforcement. He worked as campus policeman, county jailer, security guard, traffic accident investigator, and detective). So the one time in his life that he was to be honored for his diligence, society looked down on him and said he is not worthy, he doesn’t possess the image of a hero and they stole his honor away. They railroaded him with their lies and conjectures.
30 Nov 2019, 9:23 am
