Atlanta Olympics Bomber Jailed for Life

(ATR) The man who tried to cause havoc at the Atlanta Olympics with a series of bombs will spend the rest of his life in jail. A federal judge sentenced Eric Rudolph to three consecutive life sentences in a courtroom less than a mile from the site of the Centennial Park bombing on July 26, 1996.

The bombing led to the death of Georgia woman from injuries and a heart attack for a TV cameraman from Turkey who rushed to the scene. Hundreds of other people were injured. Some of them spoke at Rudolph?s sentencing hearing.

"You are a very small man," said John Hawthorne, accusing Rudolph of having a Napoleonic complex.

"Small man, big bomb," said Hawthorne, whose wife Alice was killed in the blast. He noted that the sentencing hearing was taking place on what would have been the couple's 18th wedding anniversary.

Fallon Stubbs, 22, Alice Hawthorne's daughter who was seriously wounded in the bombing, was one of the few witnesses who came close to offering any forgiveness to Rudolph.

"In all honesty Mr. Rudolph, I would not be who I am today without you. I have learned to be a tolerant person because of you, to accept people who are different than I am, and embrace their differences," Stubbs said to Rudolph.

Rudolph sat stoically through most of the 90-minute hearing, but smirked a time or two during some of the victim testimony.

Mary Lee, a worker at the AT&T Global Pavilion who was injured in the attack, told Rudolph "I wanted to find you and kill you," expressing disappointment that he would not face the death penalty.

Under a plea agreement reached earlier this year, the 38-year old will receive four consecutive life sentences, plus other prison terms, all to be served consecutively. He was also ordered to pay more than $3.3 million in compensation to the victims, a sum unlikely to be paid, given Rudolph's pauper status.

Not present in the courtroom were officials from the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, who were plunged into crisis for days after the attack midway through the Games.

While the Olympic Games continued without any competitions being cancelled, Centennial Olympic Park was closed for several days after the bomb, re-opening with security checkpoints to search all visitors and their belongings.

ACOG is still on the defense for the Centennial Park bombing, with more than three dozen victims seeking recompense for their injuries and other damages in pending lawsuits. One of those lawsuits has been settled out of court.

"How this man has haunted me," A.D. Frazier, ACOG chief operating officer tells Around the Rings about Rudolph, but says he had no interest in seeing him in court today.

"He's sick, an evil person," says Frazier, who says he feels "the sense of intense hurt" experienced by the victims of the bomb.

Frazier was sleeping on a cot in his ACOG office overlooking Centennial Olympic Park when he heard the bomb explode.

Rudolph, given the chance to speak, said he had never planned to harm civilians in the bombing. He said that law enforcement officers were the target.

In echoes from a statement he released in April when Rudolph agreed to a plea bargain, he said the attack on the Olympics was meant to attack what he called the "global socialism of the U.S."

Apologizing to the Olympic Park vicitims, Rudolph admitted his actions were wrong.

"I would do anything to take that night back," he told U.S. District Judge Charles Pannell

Rudolph said he tried to warn of the pending attack in two calls to 911 minutes after leaving his backpack bomb in the park. By way of the warning, he said he had hoped that park crowds would be evacuated, leaving law enforcement officers as the intended victims.

Rudolph said that as he left Atlanta that night to return home to North Carolina, he stopped at a construction site outside in Atlanta where four other bombs were store and destroyed them.

Despite his supposed regret, in the two years that followed, Rudolph would go on to bomb abortion clinics in Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama and a nightclub in Atlanta, killing a policeman and injuring dozens more people. Rudolph stayed in hiding in the North Carolina mountains until he was caught in 2003. Earlier this month he received a life sentence for the Birmingham attack .

Judge Pannell told Rudolph that he takes "some professional satisfaction of being part of a process that prevents you from killing or hurting anybody else."

Pannell then ordered two hefty U.S. marshals to take custody of Rudolph. Clad in a dark blue business suit and blue shirt, Rudolph showed no emotion, unseen leg shackles rattling as he shuffled out of court, headed to a maximum security prison in a desolate corner of Colorado.