Picture Lineup Placed On Hold For Lack Of Photos
Copyright, 1997, The Spokesman-Review
The FBI couldn’t round up a half-dozen pictures of curly haired men Tuesday so agents could show a photo lineup to a woman who may have seen the Olympics bomber.
That development came as the FBI announced a top-level shake-up of its 100-member task force investigating the July 27 bombing.
Deputy Director Weldon Kennedy didn’t say in a statement why he is sending a new supervisor to Atlanta to manage the bombing investigation.
FBI agents in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., were scrambling Tuesday to talk with two witnesses interviewed a day earlier by The Spokesman-Review.
One potential eyewitness is a 25-year-old law school student whose father, an Atlanta architect, says he is convinced he saw a Spokane Valley bombing suspect outside Centennial Olympic Park an hour before the Atlanta bomb went off, killing one woman and injuring more than 100 people.
The architect believes he saw Robert S. Berry, a 42-year-old Sandpoint man who has curly hair and a beard, carrying a military-style backpack and bumping into people near Centennial Park.
The architect came to that conclusion after watching an Atlanta television news report showing photos of Berry and two other suspects charged with the Spokane bombings and bank robberies.
The Atlanta TV story was based on an earlier news story in Sunday’s editions of The Spokesman-Review, detailing possible links between the Spokane case and the Olympics bombing.
The men held in the Spokane case are not suspects in the Atlanta blast, FBI officials say, but there’s increasing interest in them.
“There’s a whole lot here we see now that’s worth pursuing,” a senior FBI official said Tuesday.
The architect was interviewed Tuesday for the first time by the FBI.
He said agents verified that their Washington, D.C., and Atlanta offices received his sketch of the Centennial Park stranger on July 27 and Dec. 10.
“You got to be kidding me,” he said when told his daughter wasn’t shown a photo lineup when she was interviewed Tuesday. “That’s truly unbelievable.”
He sent his composite drawing of the stranger to the FBI twice last year, immediately after the bombing and again in December, but says he wasn’t contacted either time.
“They didn’t have any excuses when they talked with me Tuesday,” the architect said.
The FBI agents asked him “not to really discuss” specifics of Tuesday’s interview, which lasted about an hour, he said.
His daughter said she saw the same man, describing him as “intoxicated or stoned,” bumping into people leaving the park.
Her independent recollection of the stranger she saw before the July 27 bombing isn’t tainted, because she hasn’t seen pictures of the Spokane suspects.
The young woman said she was interviewed by an FBI agent Tuesday at a Washington, D.C., restaurant and was shown photos of a military-style backpack believed used in the Olympics bombing.
“It went OK and pretty quickly,” the woman said. “The only pictures they showed me were ones of backpacks and none of people.”
A senior FBI official said the potential witness wasn’t shown a photo lineup because five pictures of men resembling Berry couldn’t be quickly assembled.
The FBI headquarters is in Washington, D.C., and agents there have Berry’s mug shot. But other archived pictures used in carefully arranged photo montages come from the FBI’s new records center in West Virginia.
The woman likely will be interviewed again by the FBI, possibly as early as today, after the six mug shots are assembled.
An FBI official Tuesday said this week’s Spokane-related news accounts have stirred new leads and renewed public interest in the Olympics bombing.
“It is bringing new information forward,” the official said.
In his statement, Deputy Director Kennedy said leads involving the Spokane bombing suspects are “being thoroughly explored along with every other possibility.”
Kennedy said a senior FBI official, Inspector Jack Dalton, has been assigned to manage the Olympics bombing investigation “and the voluminous information being developed.”
, DataTimes