Loner from tight-knit family
PFLUGERVILLE, Texas — The Austin bombing suspect who blew himself up Wednesday in a confrontation with police was an intense loner who grew up in a tight-knit, deeply religious family, according to friends and neighbors.
Mark Conditt, 23, could sometimes get angry over a misunderstanding, remembered Jeremiah Jensen, who knew Conditt because they were both homeschooled in Pflugerville, a town 20 miles north of Austin.
Jensen said he was one of a few people who tried to push through Conditt’s “hard-to-getalong-with” exterior. He said Conditt was not overtly political when they were growing up, but seemed to like debating issues and probing logical extremes.
“He could be dominant in conversations,” said Jensen, 24, who now lives in Dallas and had not been in touch with Conditt frequently for the last four or five years. “It would seem like he was trying to argue with you and give pushback on things you were trying to say. It didn’t have to be serious. He liked to debate.”
Chief Brian Manley of the Austin Police Department said that Conditt had made a 25-minute recording in which he discussed the bombs and how he had made them. The recording, Manley said, was “the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point.”
In Pflugerville, authorities swarmed a home where Conditt had been living with two roommates, a location that Gov. Greg Abbott told reporters could contain a “treasure trove” about the suspect’s motives and methods.
The roommates were detained for questioning, and one had been released by Wednesday afternoon, according to the Austin Police Department.
Investigators also searched the nearby home of Conditt’s parents, including several backyard sheds on their property, but had not found any explosive devices by Wednesday afternoon. Detective David Fugitt, a homicide detective with the Austin police, told reporters that the Conditt family was cooperating.
“We don’t have any information to believe that the family had any knowledge of these events,” Fugitt said. “They’re having a difficult time. This is certainly a shock to the conscience.”
Family friends, neighbors and former classmates were at a loss to explain why Conditt had carried out the attacks, how he had learned about bomb-making or whether he was driven by racial animus. The first bombs hit members of African-American families who were well known locally, killing a 17-year-old boy and a 39-year-old man. Conditt was white.
Conditt grew up as the quiet, socially awkward oldest child of a devout Christian family that held Bible study groups in their white clapboard house, where an American flag hangs from the front porch.
After Conditt, 23, was identified Wednesday as the serial bomber who killed two people and terrorized Texas’ capital, Conditt’s mother sent a text message to a friend, Donna Sebastian Harp. It said: “Pray for our family. We are under attack” — a reference to a spiritual assault. “It’s a Christianese thing we say,” Harp said. “Pray: the situation is very serious.”
Abbott told the television station KXAN that Conditt did not have a criminal record, had not served in the military and was unemployed.
In 2012, Conditt hashed out some of his views on a blog that he created for a political science class while he was a student at Austin Community College. Jessica Vess, a college spokeswoman, said that Conditt had attended from 2010-12 as a business administration major.
McKenna McIntosh, who was in the political science class with Conditt, said that the views on his blog — called Defining My Stance — were as “clear as day.”
Jeff Reeb, 75, a neighbor of Conditt’s parents, said the Conditts had never expressed concerns about their son to him.
“I can tell you nothing about him personally, except that he was a nice, young kid,” Reeb said. “He always seemed like he was smart. And he always seemed like he was very polite.”
Reeb added: “My summation is it doesn’t make any sense.”