Nashville blast investigation leads U.S. agents to suburban home

[rooster59]

Nashville blast investigation leads U.S. agents to suburban home

By Harrison McClary and Gabriella Borter

 

Law enforcement officers gather to investigate information arising the day after a downtown Nashville explosion, outside a duplex house in Antioch, Tennessee, U.S. December 26, 2020. REUTERS/Harrison McClary

 

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Reuters) - Federal agents investigating the explosion of a motor home in Nashville were searching a two-story suburban house on Saturday for clues to the blast, which injured three people in the heart of America's country music capital on Christmas Day.

 

Federal agents were also trying to identify apparent human remains found near the exploded vehicle.

 

The motor home, parked on a downtown street of Tennessee's largest city, exploded at dawn on Friday moments after police responding to reports of gunfire noticed it and heard an automated message emanating from the vehicle warning of a bomb.

 

The thunderous, fiery blast destroyed several vehicles, damaged more than 40 businesses and left a trail of shards from shattered windows.

 

Following up on what they said were more than 500 leads, local police and agents from the FBI and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were searching a two-story, red-brick house on Bakertown Road in Antioch, Tennessee, 11 miles (18 km) southeast of Nashville, paying particular attention to its basement, according to a Reuters witness.

 

Officials on Saturday declined to name a person of interest in connection with the explosion, but CBS News reported that the investigation has honed in on 63-year-old Anthony Quinn Warner, who recently lived at the Bakertown address, public records showed. According to a document posted online, on Nov. 25 he signed over the property to a woman in Los Angeles at no cost to her. The document was signed by Warner, but not by the woman.

 

Google Street View images of the house from 2019 show what appears to be a white motor home in the driveway. Neighbors told local TV station WKRN that the recreational vehicle had been parked there for years and is now gone.

 

"Once we have processed the scene, we will look at the evidence and anything that we have recovered from this residence and see how that fits into this investigation," FBI spokesman Darrell Debusk, who was at the house on Saturday, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

 

"At this point we're not prepared to identify any single individual," FBI Special Agent in Charge Doug Korneski said at a news conference on Saturday.

 

Korneski told reporters that investigators were "vigorously working on" identifying what appeared to be human remains found in the wreckage. He declined to say whether investigators believe the remains belong to the person behind what officials say was "an intentional act."

 

Korneski said the FBI's Quantico, Virginia-based Behavioral Analysis Unit was helping determine the motivation of the person responsible.

 

The vehicle was parked outside an AT&T Inc office, and the blast caused widespread telephone, internet and TV service outages in central Tennessee and parts of several neighboring states, including Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia.

 

A RECORDING, THEN A BLAST

 

Adding to the cryptic nature of Friday's incident was the eerie preamble described by police and witnesses - a crackle of gunfire followed by an apparently computer-generated female voice from the RV reciting a minute-by-minute countdown to an impending bombing.

 

Police scrambled to evacuate nearby homes and buildings and called for a bomb squad, which was en route to the scene when the RV blew up.

 

Police later posted a photo of the motor home, which they said had arrived in the area about five hours prior to the explosion.

 

Officials said 41 businesses were damaged and three people were hospitalized with relatively minor injuries. City authorities hailed police officers who they said likely prevented more casualties by acting quickly to clear the area.

 

Dozens of agents from the FBI and the ATF were surveying the scene on Saturday. Parked cars and trees were blackened and an exploded water pipe that had been spraying overnight had covered trees in a layer of ice.

 

"All the windows came in from the living room into the bedroom. The front door became unhinged," Buck McCoy, who lives on the block where the blast occurred, told WKRN. "I had blood coming from my face and on my side and on my legs and a little bit on my feet."

 

Among those hit by communications problems as a result of damage to the AT&T building from the blast were police departments, emergency services and Nashville International Airport, which temporarily halted flights Friday afternoon.

 

AT&T said on Saturday that a fire reignited at the building overnight, forcing it to be evacuated, but workers were able to drill access holes into the building to connect generators to critical equipment that it hoped to have back online in hours.

 

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee visited the scene on Saturday and said in a Twitter post it was a "miracle" that no one was killed. In a letter to President Donald Trump, Lee requested a federal emergency declaration to aid relief efforts.

 

(Reporting by Harrison McClary in Nashville and Gabriella Borter in Fairfield, Conn.; Additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta and Raphael Satter, Katanga Johnson and Lucia Mutikani in Washington; Writing by Gabriella Borter; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Matthew Lewis and Leslie Adler)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2020-12-27

 

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[Pattaya Spotter]

If a suicide...you gotta give him points for originality. 

[mtls2005]

Well, you have to admit that it is an unusually complex method of suicide, I mean unless his name was Rube Goldberg.

 

 

[Enoon]

4 hours ago, mtls2005 said:

Well, you have to admit that it is an unusually complex method of suicide, I mean unless his name was Rube Goldberg.

 

 

 

Or "Heath Robinson" for the British.

 

 

 

[pacovl46]

At least he gave the people in the area a 15 minute warning! 

[7by7]

So, yet again, those jumping to conclusions based upon zero evidence have been proven wrong.

 

When will people learn to await the evidence before assigning blame based upon their own political prejudices?

[Tug]

He went out with a bang!

[pegman]

 Suspicion is he was a G5 paranoid of some sort. The FBI  have been asking people that knew him about that. Would make sense since he seemingly went after a tech communications company. As far as his politics go he was not on state electoral rolls.

[mtls2005]

Girlfriend warned Nashville police Anthony Warner was building bomb a year ago, report shows

 

NASHVILLE — Sixteen months before Anthony Quinn Warner's RV exploded in downtown Nashville on Christmas morning, officers visited his home in Antioch after his girlfriend reported that he was making bombs in the vehicle, according to documents obtained by The Tennessean. 

 

In the aftermath, The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said Warner was "not on our radar" prior to the bombing. But a Metro Nashville Police Department report from August 2019 shows that local and federal authorities were aware of alleged threats he had made.

 

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/crime/2020/12/29/nashville-explosion-woman-warned-mnpd-warner-building-bomb-2019/4082253001/

[welovesundaysatspace]

Had this been a Moslem, this thread would have 30 pages already. Good he’s just a white Christian man. 

[mtls2005]

19 hours ago, welovesundaysatspace said:

Good he’s just a white Christian man. 

 

Yep.

 

Starting to hear the sympathetic quotes that "if only we could have gotten him the help he needed this could have been avoided".

 

He's a freakin' terrorist.

 

 

[mtls2005]

Feds probing whether Nashville bomber believed in lizard people conspiracy

Investigators are aware of statements the suspect made about a conspiracy theory that powerful politicians and Hollywood figures are lizards who have extraterrestrial origins.

 

nvestigators are exploring several conspiracy theories as potential motives behind the Christmas Day bombing outside an AT&T building in Nashville, Tennessee, including evidence that the bomber believed in lizard people and a so-called reptilian conspiracy, two senior law enforcement officials said Wednesday

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/girlfriend-nashville-bomber-warned-police-he-was-building-explosives-2019-n1252536

 

 

Unclear on how a suicide RV will defeat the lizard people though?

 

 

[rabas]

On 12/28/2020 at 2:05 AM, pegman said:

 Suspicion is he was a G5 paranoid of some sort. The FBI  have been asking people that knew him about that. Would make sense since he seemingly went after a tech communications company. As far as his politics go he was not on state electoral rolls.

Unfortunately, he was building the bomb before Covid and talk about G5 causing it.

[simple1]

7 hours ago, rabas said:

Unfortunately, he was building the bomb before Covid and talk about G5 causing it.

 

As posted above and in media reports it seems the guy was a QAnon weirdo, one of the many really strange conspiracy theories promoted and supported by trump world.

[PattayaJames]

On 12/30/2020 at 4:55 AM, welovesundaysatspace said:

Had this been a Moslem, this thread would have 30 pages already. Good he’s just a white Christian man. 

 

Had it been a Moslem, there would be no warning, a busy location and time selected and the bomb packed with shrapnel to kill and maim as many as possible.

 

Whatever the reason behind this it seems that killing and maiming innocent people was not the objective. 

[John Drake]

What happened to this story? It seems to have completely disappeared from the news.

[GinBoy2]

22 hours ago, simple1 said:

 

As posted above and in media reports it seems the guy was a QAnon weirdo, one of the many really strange conspiracy theories promoted and supported by trump world.

Well it also looks like he was into the whole lizard people conspiracy thing.

 

The guy was clearly a total nutjob, but it appears the world, thanks to the internet is now awash with equally weird whack jobs.

 

Long Live the Lizard people I guess!

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/girlfriend-nashville-bomber-warned-police-he-was-building-explosives-2019-n1252536

Edited January 1, 2021 by GinBoy2

[Sujo]

22 hours ago, PattayaJames said:

 

Had it been a Moslem, there would be no warning, a busy location and time selected and the bomb packed with shrapnel to kill and maim as many as possible.

 

Whatever the reason behind this it seems that killing and maiming innocent people was not the objective. 

Muslim terrorism is not a major concern in US. White supremist terrorism is, guess who they support.

[placeholder]

4 hours ago, John Drake said:

What happened to this story? It seems to have completely disappeared from the news.

You think it has a larger significance?

[John Drake]

15 minutes ago, placeholder said:

You think it has a larger significance?

 

I have no idea. I just no it was super hot news and then all but disappeared without any resolution other than vague insinuations about cults.

[Jingthing]

5 hours ago, John Drake said:

What happened to this story? It seems to have completely disappeared from the news.

It not news anymore because --

 

The culprit is now known.

Nobody was killed except for the suicide bomber.

He clearly didn't want to kill people though he knew it could happen.

The culprit was very strange but a specific motivation can't be determined. 

It may never be determined. 

If it is, it will be in the news again.

Edited January 1, 2021 by Jingthing

[Scott]

Off-topic, troll posts removed.