Behind the bombing, a conspiracy theorist mad about the government
NASHVILLE, TENN.» Crystal Deck was opening presents on Christmas morning at her brother’s home when she heard the news that an enormous explosion had ripped through the historic heart of Nashville.
She knew instantly that the bomber was her dearest friend, Anthony Q. Warner, and quickly began fitting together clues that he had dropped, including a series of peculiar episodes she had dismissed as inconsequential, but which proved to be central to his suicidal plot.
Deck had, weeks earlier, found him fiddling with a prerecorded female voice on his laptop. And he had played her the 1964 Petula Clark hit “Downtown,” praising the song’s “significant spirit.” Both became eerie elements of the bombing.
Warner had even cautioned her that he was hatching something that would bring the police to her door, yet until that moment she had not understood the magnitude of his plan.
“I had just texted him ‘Merry Christmas!’
” she said, crying at the memory.
Though Warner’s motive remains shrouded, false information and outlandish tales had poisoned his mind, apparently driving him to spectacular violence. This mindset has become alarmingly familiar to law enforcement officials now reckoning with the destructive force of conspiracy theories that mutate endlessly online and played a role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Warner, who was 63 when he died, was not among the angry QAnon followers who came to believe the unlikely theory that Donald Trump would hold onto power and defeat a satanic cabal. He was a computer specialist with a deep distrust of government, according to his own writings and to those who knew him. A loner, he had made at least one female friend feel manipulated and frightened. And he had cultivated a bizarre obsession with shape-shifting alien lizards and a dense thicket of other peculiar ideas.
As Warner’s best friend in his final months, Deck believes that some combination of a fatal cancer diagnosis salted with a belief in conspiracy theories led Warner to kill himself in such a brutally spectacular manner.
“He was trying to escape,” said Deck, who is not considered a suspect. “He talked about going out on his own terms.”
Warner, authorities said, drove his booby-trapped white recreational vehicle to Second Avenue North in the predawn hours. The detonation damaged some 50 buildings, collapsing a few and shearing the antique brick facades off others that will require years and tens of millions of dollars to restore. Two months later, the blast area remains a confused, desolate patchwork of boarded-up buildings, chain-link fencing and uneven reconstruction efforts.
The explosion, in front of an AT&T hub, crippled cellular, internet and cable service across several states for two days and underscored the vulnerability of such common yet unprotected facilities.
The FBI and other federal and local law enforcement agencies investigating the bombing have not made any findings public, although officials said they expect a report by early March.
Whatever else might have been on War