Agents scour home as they hunt for blast clues
Federal officials said Saturday that the investigation was following up on nearly 500 tips that had been called in.
NASHVILLE, TENN. » 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, Tennessee.
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 63-year- 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 enforcement 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, Tennessee, 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, a severalblock
area was closed off in a search for evidence Saturday. Officials said that they were aware of no other explosive threats and that the search so far had not uncovered any other devices in the area.
“Giant jigsaw”
“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.
But the blast 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 significant damage to the facility, causing widespread repercussions to telecommunication systems in Nashville and beyond. Officials said the outages have affected 911 operations and flights at Nashville International Airport. Across the region, residents and businesses lost cellphone service and internet connections, and many were still experiencing issues Saturday.
Boosting cell service
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.”
The explosion affected some cell service across parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama and hindered the communication of 20 or more 911 call centers, Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee said.
The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily halted flights out of Nashville International Airport because of telecommunications issues caused by the blast. The FAA also labeled the skies within about 1 mile of the blast “national defense airspace,” meaning pilots are prohibited from flying overhead without authorization.
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, Tennessee, at national retailers like Walmart and Old Navy.
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.
On Saturday morning, 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 and send federal aid to help with the recovery, given the “severity and magnitude” of the destruction.
Damage widespread
At least 41 buildings sustained damage in the blast. At a hostel near the site, security cameras captured footage of the explosion blowing in the front doors of the building, which was filled with dust and debris. More than a day later, the water from sprinklers had not been shut off.
The explosion added to what has already been a devastating year; the Nashville Downtown Hostel largely caters to international vacationers, especially young travelers, and has suffered an 80% drop in revenue from 2019 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“All of that space has been flooding since the bombing,” said Ron Lamb, who owns the hostel and who has not been able to gain access to the business. “It’s been running for 28 hours.”