San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
PERSON OF INTEREST IDENTIFIED IN TENN. EXPLOSION
Communications across three states hampered; emergency aid sought
Investigators were rushing Saturday to piece together what officials described as an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, chasing hundreds of leads, to identify the culprit and the motivation behind the Christmas Day explosion that rocked Nashville, Tenn.
Federal officials said Saturday that the investigation included hundreds of federal agents, who were following up on nearly 500 tips that had been called in since Friday. They said they were still trying to determine whether more than one person was involved.
Authorities have identified a 63year-old man who apparently owned a recreational vehicle similar to the one in the bombing and were seeking to question him, according to a federal law enforce
ment official familiar with the investigation.
On Saturday morning, several dozen investigators with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives began searching a brick duplex in Antioch, a neighborhood in the Nashville area. An image of the building from May 2019, captured on Google Street View, shows an RV in the yard that appears similar to the one that authorities say is at the center of the explosion.
“Our investigative team is turning over every stone,” Douglas Korneski, the special agent in charge of the FBI field office in Memphis, Tenn., said in a news conference Saturday, “to make sure we know as many details as possible to answer the question of who is responsible for this and also to understand why did they do this.”
In Nashville, officials said Saturday that the city was safe and that there were no known threats, but the area remained sealed off and under curfew as investigators combed through the wreckage looking for evidence.
“It is like a giant jigsaw puzzle created by a bomb that throws pieces of evidence across multiple city blocks,” Donald Cochran, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said during the Saturday briefing. “They have got to gather it; they have got to catalog it, put it back together.”
The explosion came Friday morning after Nashville police officers responding to a complaint about gunfire encountered an RV parked on Second Avenue North blaring a message that a bomb was about to detonate. The blast rippled across several blocks, blowing windows and even causing one building to collapse, and it left Nashville rattled and perplexed.
Authorities said that the explosion had the potential to inflict enormous carnage, had it detonated at a time other than early on a quiet holiday morning and without a warning that led police officers to clear away as many people in surrounding buildings as they could. Three people were hospitalized. Police officials said there were no indications of fatalities, but possible human tissue had been found amid the debris.
The blast — which officials described as an “intentional act” and “deliberate bomb” — caused considerable disruption, as it damaged a critical piece of the broader area’s telecommunications infrastructure. Authorities were also forced to cordon off a large section of downtown, displacing dozens of people and leaving business owners unable to reach their shops and offices.
One of the major lines of inquiry was whether there was significance in the location of the blast: on a downtown street in front of an AT&T transmission building. The explosion created heavy damage to the facility, causing widespread repercussions to telecommunication systems in Nashville and beyond.
A day after the explosion, AT&T communication networks remained disrupted throughout Tennessee, with outages affecting residential phones, cellphones and service at 20 call centers for 911. Business and government functions were hobbled, and flights were temporarily grounded at Nashville International Airport.
Some residents and businesses in Kentucky and Alabama also lost cellphone service and Internet connections, and many were still experiencing issues Saturday.
AT&T has installed portable cell sites in downtown Nashville to alleviate some of the outages, the company said. Workers were drilling access holes into the building and trying to restore power to equipment essential to resuming service.
“Challenges remain, including a fire which reignited overnight and led to the evacuation of the building,” the company said in a statement Saturday. And in a previous statement, AT&T officials said, “There are serious logistical challenges to working in a disaster area and we will make measurable progress in the hours and days ahead.”
On the day after Christmas, shoppers at some retail outlets had to pay with cash or checks, as sellers could not access credit card systems.
Cash-only sales were reported by shoppers in Dickson and Franklin, Tenn., at national retailers like Walmart and Old Navy.
It could take days before service is fully restored, officials said.
“It is a big operation with the building itself,” William Swann, the chief of the Nashville Fire Department, said Saturday of the AT&T building. “We are trying to at least get the generators back in order so that the mobile phones can be back in operation.”
Efforts were complicated by a fire that reignited in the building Friday night, AT&T said Saturday.
In Antioch, roughly 11 miles from the site of the explosion, federal agents swarmed one of the units in a complex of matching duplexes, all while children played tag outside and neighbors watched the investigators work. The home had been cleared by SWAT and bomb teams to ensure it was safe.
Tony Rodriguez, who lives in the second home of the duplex that law enforcement searched, said investigators removed a computer motherboard from his neighbor’s home, among other things.
Rodriguez said he never spoke to his neighbor and didn’t know his name. The few times Rodriguez saw the man, he was tinkering with an antennae above the house and power washing the driveway behind their home. Rodriguez said the neighbor kept several “No Trespassing” and warning signs around his property, particularly where he kept the RV.
“He always seemed like an oddball,” Rodriguez said.
On Saturday morning, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, toured the scene of the explosion and shared a letter he wrote to President Donald Trump asking him to declare an emergency disaster for Tennessee.
In his request, Lee referred to the incident as an “attack” carried out with a “vehicle-born improvised explosive device” and called on the president to issue the declaration, unlocking financial and physical assistance from the federal government. The White House has not publicly responded to Lee’s request. Trump was briefed on the situation Friday and is monitoring developments, a spokesperson said Friday.
Nashville Mayor John Cooper said at least 41 businesses were damaged and “there will be others as we see the full extent of this.” He said the city would focus on rebuilding but cautioned that it “will be some time before Second Avenue is back to normal.”
In his letter to Trump, Lee noted that many of the buildings rocked by the blast were historic and needed to be assessed by an engineer to make sure they are structurally sound.
The Washington Post contributed to this report.