‘I TOLD MYSELF STAY ALIVE’
Five Nashville cops on Sunday recalled the chaos and horror of the RV bomb blast that rocked the city — and their frantic efforts to save lives as an audio recording counted down the minutes to hell.
“I just see orange, and then I hear a loud boom,” Officer James Wells, the cop closest to the recreational vehicle when the explosion hit, told reporters. “It rocked me down hard. I start stumbling and just tell myself to stay on my feet, stay alive.”
The emotional cop added, “Christmas will never be the same for any of us.”
Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, an IT expert, was named by authorities Sunday as the culprit of the suicide blast, with investigators reportedly probing if he targeted an AT&T building over fears of 5G cellular technology and government surveillance.
Wells was among the cops who responded to what was initially a report of gunfire along a commercial stretch of the Music City, which normally would have been hopping, but was largely deserted Christmas morning. The first officers on scene, James Luellen and Brenna Hosey, found no sign of gunplay, but instead heard a chilling audio recording emanating from an RV parked outside the AT&T building, urging people to clear the area.
“I looked at Officer Hosey just to verify we heard the same thing,” Luellen said. “And then [the recording] started over.”
A short distance away, Wells and Officer Amanda Topping were nearing the end of their tour.
“My wife had just called because it’s towards the end of our shift, so she’s seeing what time I was coming home,” Topping recalled. “I’m like, ‘Well, we’re about to head to this call, it’s a little strange.’ ”
Wells and Topping answered a call for backup — initially parking their patrol car next to the riggedto-blow RV before realizing its role in the growing chaos.
While Sgt. Timothy Miller directed operations, Luellen, Hosey, Wells, Topping and Officer Michael Sipos evacuated area buildings and blocked off traffic.
One door-knock stood out to
Hosey.
“Sipos and I knocked on [a woman’s] door, scared the bejesus out of her,” said Hosey. “She said, ‘OK, let me get my kids.’
“That kind of just put my heart up in my throat. I don’t have kids, but I have cousins and nieces and people that I love that are small. So I’m thinking maybe one or two kids,” Hosey said. “She ended up having four kids.”
Wells, too, was helping evacuate — while fearing an ambush.
“I actually told everybody when we came out to make sure we look at the high ground and parking garages, just in case,” he said. “I’m preparing for a shootout.”
With three minutes left in the countdown — eerily punctuated on the recording by the Petula Clark pop classic “Downtown” — Wells returned to his car to put on sturdier protective gear.
“I told them I was going to go . . . get my heavy plates, just mentally getting prepared for whatever was about to happen,” he said.
“I’m starting to go back toward Luellen and Hosey, and as I’m getting ready to walk toward them, back toward the RV . . . I literally hear God telling me to turn around and go check on Topping, who was by herself down on Broadway,” he said.
“As I turn around, for me it felt like I only took three steps, and then the music stopped.”
That’s when the explosion rocked Nashville, Wells said.
“I just saw the biggest flames I’ve ever seen, the biggest explosion. I just saw orange,” Topping said. “I saw [Wells] stumble, and I felt [the blast]. I felt the heat, the wave.” Topping “took off in a sprint” toward her partner.
“I’ve never grabbed somebody so hard in my life,” she said. “I grabbed him, he grabbed me, and we just ducked into a doorway because we didn’t know what was coming afterwards. I’ll never forget the window shattering after the blast, all around me.”
Topping radioed for medics, not knowing the condition of her four fellow cops.
“I was so scared that I’d just lost my entire detail,” she said, her voice strained with emotion.
Three people suffered minor injuries in the explosion.
Wells voiced gratitude that he lived to tell the harrowing tale.
“It was God,” he said, of the force that made him change direction before the blast. “That’s what saved my life.
“That’s what got me to see my kids and my wife on Christmas, and ‘good to see you’ has a completely different meaning for me now.”