‘We don’t know if there are any other bombs out there’
In the wake of a series of explosions which resulted in two deaths, Austin police are searching for the suspect’s motives. Mythili Sampathkumar and Andrew Buncombe report
Police in Texas are hunting for clues as to what drove an unemployed young man to launch a bombing spree that terrorised a region and ended when he killed himself by the side of a road.
While searching for possible accomplices and warning people to be on the alert for suspicious packages, officials said that 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt appeared to have acted alone in posting and triggering the bombs that killed two people and injured six. The young man ended three weeks of anxiety
and violence in the early hours of yesterday when he blew himself up by the side of a road, apparently detonating a device in his vehicle as authorities closed in on him.
“The suspect is deceased and has significant injuries from a blast that occurred from detonating a bomb inside his vehicle,” Austin police chief Brian Manley told reporters yesterday.
Police discovered a 25-minute recording on a mobile which Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said he considered a “confession”. Manley said that Conditt talked on the recording in great detail about the differences among the bombs he built.
He said that the tape was “the outcry of a very challenged young man”.
The suspect lived with two housemates in Pflugerville, a town located 20 miles north-east of Austin. A local politician told a television channel it appeared Conditt had purchased materials to make his bombs from a Home Depot hardware store in Austin. Reports said among the items he purchased were five signs that read: “CAUTION CHILDREN AT PLAY”. A tripwire bomb that injured two men on Sunday was tied to one of the signs, reports said.
Lee Roca, a neighbour of Conditt’s, told The Independent he had seen the suspect “more than a few times” at a neighbourhood bar called the Red Rooster on karaoke nights. “Sometimes when I do my music I get 10 handshakes at the end” and it “could be” that he shook hands with Conditt at some point, he said.
He said he was shocked when he was shown a picture of Conditt. “Hey, I know this person from the bar,” he added. “I was worried about the bombings, yes, very much … because it could happen anywhere. You drive over a box or something in the road and be exploded in a minute,” said Mr Roca. Texas Governor Greg Abbott said said his flatmates were cooperating with police. He said police used mobile traffic data to put the suspect at the site of the explosions around Austin. He said the suspect’s phone number had been used to allow investigators close in on him.
The governor said that as police continued their investigation, people should be on the lookout for anything suspicious. “We don’t know if there are any other bombs out there and, if so, how many or where they may be,” he told Fox News. “We need to go throughout the day and make sure we rule out whether anybody else was involved in this process.”
Several hours after Mr Abbott spoke, police in Pflugerville evacuated the area around the house in which the suspect lived. At around noon local time, police and federal agents, who flooded two streets, told residents to leave and the media were pushed back. At the same time, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) deployed a anti-blast robot.
The Austin American-Statesman said Conditt, the oldest of four children, had been unemployed for a year.
He had been homeschooled by his mother, and then studied at the Austin Community College’s Northridge Campus, though he did not complete his degree. He had worked at Crux Semiconductor in Austin as a “purchasing agent/buyer/shipping and receiving”. The company’s owner, who asked to be identified only as Tim, said he worked there for four years but was fired last summer after failing to meet “expectations and was not taking job tasks seriously”. “He was a smart kid who had a lot of promise,” he told the KHOU channel.
Before his death Conditt had been criminally charged with one count of unlawful possession and transfer of a destructive device, the US attorney for the Western District of Texas said in a press release yesterday.
The suspect appeared to have only a modest social media presence. However, his mother, Danene Conditt, posted a picture in February 2013 to commemorate her son’s completing his high school level education. “I officially graduated Mark from high school on Friday. One down, three to go. He has 30 hrs of college credit too, but he’s thinking of taking some time to figure out what he wants to do ... maybe a mission trip,” she wrote. “Thanks to everyone for your support over the years.”
The suspect’s actions left a 39-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy dead, while a woman in her forties and a 75-year-old woman were critically injured. Two men in their twenties were wounded in the fourth attack, and a FedEx employee suffered a concussion in the fifth explosion which happened at a sorting office in the city of San Antonio, about 100 miles from Austin.
JJ MacNab, an expert on anti-government thought and a fellow of the George Washington University’s programme on extremism, found what appeared to be a blog the suspect had created for a college project when he was 18. In it, he laid out several conservative views, including his opposition to same-sex marriage, his opposition to “free abortions” and his support for the death penalty.
“My name is Mark Conditt. I enjoy cycling, parkour, tennis, reading, and listening to music,” he wrote on the blog’s biographical profile. “I am not that politically inclined. I view myself as a conservative, but I don’t think I have enough information to defend my stance as well as it should be defended. The reasons I am taking this class is because I want to understand the US government, and I hope that it will help me clarify my stance, and then defend it.”
Ms MacNab said: “There are lots of people in Texas who have these views. There are lots of people across the US who share these views, and don’t go out and bomb people. Maybe this is important; maybe it’s not.”
She said police would likely look into the circumstances of his firing as they searched for clues about possible motivation. She said given the ethnic variety of the victims, it did not appear the incidents were motivated by racism.
“We just don’t know these things yet,” she added.