BOMBINGS SPARK CALLS FOR UNITY IN AUSTIN
East Austin community members call for unity; some upset with police.
When Da’mon Stith’s daughter called him in the middle of the day and told him she’d found a package in front of their door at their neighborhood off Cameron Road in Northeast Austin, his heart stopped.
“In that moment, I experienced a great fear,” Stith said. “I was too far away to deal with it physically myself. I had to help her be calm and to inform her that it’s OK, that the people that are trained to handle that stuff will handle it. And they did.”
Three deadly package bombs — two on Monday — had exploded in East Austin in 10 days. Police later confirmed that Stith’s box was safe.
But Stith was one of more than 600 people, as of Friday, who had called authorities to report a suspicious package in the days after Monday’s explosions (none proved to be dangerous). He also was one of 300 who attended a community meeting Thursday night to voice anxiety and call for the community to use the bombings as a lesson to come together.
Over and over again, as community members took the microphone — the scared, the angry, the hopeful — common themes emerged: There is strength in unity, they said. Bolster neighborhoods. Create neighborhood watch groups. Reach for an era when neighbors knew each other’s names, had each other’s backs and noticed unusual visitors and packages. Check to make sure things are OK.
Those were the areas where there was the consensus, but activists remained deeply divided in their responses to the Austin Police Department’s handling of
Manley reiterated tips police have been sharing. He said that none of the three devices ‘exploded without being handled.’
the bombings. While some urged each other not to point fingers, others decried what they called a racist approach to the first attack.
Several people questioned whether Austin police would have more readily sounded the alarm and warned the community about the package bombs sooner had the victim of the first bombing been white and had it happened in a neighborhood west of Interstate 35.
“Why is APD OK with always just apologizing with what happens to our communities?” said Austin activist Fatima Mann, who runs the organization Counter Balance ATX.
Interim Police Chief Brian Manley, who spoke and took questions at the meeting, apologized to the crowd for the fact that, three days after the first package bomb killed 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House — and before any other bombing deaths had occurred — an Austin police investigator suggested that authorities were looking into many possibilities, including the possibility of suicide.
“I apologize that as a department we put that out there because that was not appropriate,” Manley said.
One woman asked Manley why investigators were not referring to the bombing incidents as terrorism.
The law enforcement definition of terrorism, he said, is an attack that was likely spurred by an ideology — whether racial, religious or otherwise. That isn’t the case now since investigators are still working to figure out what the attacker’s motive was.
That being said, “it’s clear to everybody involved this is creating terror in our community, this is creating fear,” Manley said.
Maya Guerra Gamble, who is running for district judge, said during the town hall that she’s been going doorto-door to campaign, and “what I’ve realized is that people in Austin are scared. They’re scared to see someone they don’t already know come to their door.”
“We need to make those connections,” she said. “When I was a kid, you did not walk past someone without saying hello, you did not drive past someone without saying hello . ... We need to bring back, not just that civility, but that genuine engage- ment in each other’s lives.”
Doing so might be the key to preventing a future attack, she said, a sentiment that many others echoed.
Northwest Austin resident Diana Earl said she agreed with the speakers who said they needed to come together.
“They need to see that they can’t separate us,” she said. “They can’t separate us by race.”
Manley reiterated tips that police have been sharing with the community. The packages that exploded didn’t come through any official mail distributor and appear to have been left on doorsteps overnight. A suspicious package would be one you weren’t expecting, he said.
“These three devices, none of them have exploded without being handled . ... If you have a suspicious package, don’t handle it, don’t touch it, don’t move it,” Manley said. “Just call us.”