Police said that those responsible had a “higher level of sophistication, a higher level of skill” than initially believed. Two men in their 20s were taken to the hospital with serious injuries and are expected to survive.
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The neighborhood remains on lockdown.
Police are asking anyone in the Travis Country neighborhood to provide police with video surveillance from their house if they have it.
Two men were wounded in the explosion Sunday night as they walked near a residential street. The explosion follows three similar incidents, one on March 2 that killed 39-year-old Anthony House, and two on March 12 that killed 17-year-old Draylen Mason and injured two others.
They will give Austin police, state and federal investigators a chance to focus on catching the a potential serial bombing suspect or suspects.
Police departments in Houston and San Antonio are sending bomb technicians and canine teams to Austin to help in the investigation, their police chiefs said Monday. “It’s more sophisticated. It’s not targeted to individuals”. “We are very concerned that with tripwires, a child walking down the sidewalk could hit something”.
For the fourth time this month, a device exploded on Austin residents.
As police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and ATF investigate these possibly linked explosions, a $115,000 reward is being offered to anyone with information regarding the cases. “There are helicopters overhead right now”.
Headed into a convenience store at a nearby strip center, Brett Parvin, 30, stopped to speculate about the change of technique and location in the latest bombing. Mays said she routinely gets six to eight packages delivered to her door every week and also uses grocery delivery services.
May said that as a resident of the affluent Travis Country neighborhood, she assumed she had nothing to worry about. “I guess we can’t do that”.
“I’m pretty sure the tour has enough security to keep things safe in here”.
“It’s scary”, Thad Holt, a 76-year-old retiree, said in an interview, recalling that he and his wife had strolled near the bomb site about half an hour before the explosion.
Manley said Monday that it’s too soon to say whether Sunday night’s bombing that injured two men could have been a response to his call for those behind the bombings to reach out. “As we look at the evidence, we will have to determine if we see a specific ideology behind this”. Police have not discovered a motive in the bombings and have not been willing to classify the explosions as hate-related.
Will Grote’s father told WFAA reporter Rebecca Lopez that Grote and Mathis were the victims and declined to comment further except to say that there were “angels watching over them because they are going to fully recover”. “So we’ve definitely seen a change in the method that this suspect.is using”.
“It was a thin wire or filament, kind of like fishing line”, he said.
The latest explosion came hours after authorities raised the reward by $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of whoever is responsible for the first three explosions.
“We heard this big boom and that was obviously concerning and once we heard that was an explosion, it was pretty distrustful for the kids”, he added.
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“That shows that the person who’s doing this, they know what they are doing and they’ve probably practiced a lot”, Ben West, a security analyst with the geopolitical intelligence platform Stratfor, told CNN affiliate KXAN. “We want to understand what brought you to this point, and we want to listen to you”.
