The Christmas Bomb in Nashville

WSJ.com

Christmas was lovely day.  We were on Facetime and phone calls almost all day with family and friends.  I didn’t catch the news on air or the internet all day.  It was a great respite.

The day after I took the trash out and retrieved the Wall Street Journal at the end of my driveway.  I was taken aback by a photo on the front page about the Christmas morning bombing in Nashville.

It seems police responded to an early morning report of gunshots in downtown Nashville.  They found no evidence of the gunfire.  They did, however, find an RV parked on the street by an ATT building.  There was a computer-generated female voice booming from the RV saying it would explode in fifteen minutes.  It then began a countdown.  The police rushed to evacuate the few people living around this largely commercial area. 

The RV did explode causing damage to buildings near the blast and shattering windows for blocks.  The ATT building housed the controllers and switching used for  cellular and other communications in the region.  The airport had to suspend operations.  911 systems were down for hours.

The caption in the photo on the front page of the Journal included this sentence.  “Police said the explosion seemed to be intentional.”

Huh?

What was their first clue?  I am not a law enforcement professional by any means.  But when there is a vehicle broadcasting that it is about to explode and then does as advertised, I would have no trouble deciding that the explosion was indeed intentional and premeditated.

Nevertheless, law enforcement, both local and the FBI, committed a lot significant human and technical resources to determine get to the heart of this Christmas morning explosion.  They quickly determined the make and style of the RV from surveillance footage and located a similar vehicle from other, older, surveillance video.  They narrowed it down to a person of interest and investigated the person’s home.

At first, they thought no one was killed in the blast.  A few people, however, were injured.  Then, given the small army of hundreds of federal, state, and local investigators poring over the blast site, they found human tissue and a VIN number for the RV.  The VIN was registered to the person of interest and the tissue DNA was also his.  Law enforcement was pretty certain that one Anthony Quinn Warner was responsible for this bizarre and destructive act. 

This fellow, Warner, is described as a self-employed IT professional.  He lived alone.  In the past few months, he informed all of his clients that he would no longer be working for them,  He transferred the deed of his house to a woman in California.  In the digitized countdown to the blast, the system doing the announcing and counting down from the RV also played snippets of the Petula Clark song, Dowtown.  The parts used were, “When you're alone and life is making you lonely you can always go downtown” and “When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry seems to help, I know.”

Clearly, he was lonely and beset by worries of some form.  Perhaps, he was targeting ATT for some reason.  There are speculations that he did this on Christmas morning the cause economic damage and to disrupt telecommunications and internet services but that to cause death and injury to people.  Law enforcement is working hard to determine Warner’s motive, if indeed it can be determined.

It is horrible when such things happen. The is some small solace that it was not terrorism and act of a lone troubled individual.

I wonder what makes someone tidy up their personal affairs, plan such an act, build the bomb in a vehicle, install a speaker system in the car and set up the digitized warning, countdown, and music to kill yourself and cause damage to forty-one downtown businesses?  It is a lot of determined effort.  I was blue on Christmas Eve, but it was temporary.  Many people are Covid weary but we deal with it.  I imagine, on occasion, people wonder what it would be like to be an assassin, hit man, vigilante, hacker, spy, bank robber, or jewel thief.  Reading a novel or watching about such things is about all most folks need in this regard.  Why do some people need to actually act on what the rest of us at most wonder a bit about?  What drove Warner to this?  What makes someone else go on a suicidal shooting spree?  It is an intriguing mystery to me.  I can almost understand a spontaneous act along these lines more than I can understand the meticulous planning and execution that consumed this fellow Warner.   

I may be trying to explain and understand things for which there are no good explanations.