“Agents fanned out throughout the city of Austin going to big-box retail stores as well as locally owned stores trying to determine whether or not there were suspicious purchases”, Tony Plohetski, an investigative reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, told CNN’s “New Day.” On being surrounded by police vehicles, he detonated a bomb, killing himself. The other is now being questioned by investigators.
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Police say someone dropped off a box containing an artillery simulator at an Austin Goodwill that detonated, injuring an employee and triggering a bomb scare.
What police in part focused on – and were assisted with by Conditt when he walked into a FedEx office and was caught on camera – was Austin’s affinity for online and other home-delivery services that made front-porch packages something no one would think twice about.
United States president Donald Trump, who had earlier branded the Texas bomber a “sick individual”, praised law enforcement officials.
In posts dated from 2012, a blogger who identified himself as Mark Conditt of Pflugerville wrote that gay marriage should be illegal, called for the elimination of sex offender registrations and argued in favor of the death penalty. However, law enforcement agencies have failed to ascribe a motive to the crime.
Authorities say it wasn’t related to the recent bombings that killed two people and seriously wounded four others since March 2.
The package was intercepted, unexploded, at a FedEx sorting center.
Since then, more details have emerged about the bomber, the type of bombs he used and how he was finally cornered. Having been home-schooled, the 23-year-old was close to his family, including his sisters.
Bottom line: Authorities refuse to call the white, Christian homeschooled young man who terrorized the Austin, Texas community with a series of bombings, “a terrorist”.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Chris Combs, head of the agency’s San Antonio office, says, “We are concerned that there may be other packages that are still out there”.
The man believed to be responsible for a three-week bombing campaign in Texas that killed two people and injured five others has been identified after he blew himself up in a dramatic standoff with police.
A second package, which was found at a FedEx facility near Austin’s global airport, was being examined by authorities, the FBI’s San Antonio office said in a tweet Tuesday afternoon.
Reports vary on how the suspect died: CBS Austin reports that police were closing in early Wednesday morning and the suspect died in an explosion in a vehicle. One SWAT team member fired a shot at the vehicle.
She said her son and the 23-year-old Conditt, who was white, “seemed to get along fine”.
Besides the discovery of the recording on Conditt’s cell phone, the authorities said they found “componentry and the homemade explosive material” in his house.
But the video failed to reveal a coherent motive for the attacks spread over the past three weeks, police said. She says her daughter also works at the spa.
Law enforcement officers search the area in Round Rock, Texas, where Mark Conditt blew himself up Wednesday in their probe into the Austin bombings.
The Associated Press wasn’t immediately able to confirm the report.
U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Austin who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said that investigators have obtained surveillance videos that “could possibly” show a suspect, but are still poring through video.
Conditt was described Wednesday by his uncle as a smart and kind “computer geek” and a friend said he was an assertive person who would end up being “kind of dominant and intimidating in conversation”.
Conditt is being described by police as a “skilled bomb maker”.
The latest incident turned out to be a Goodwill worker who was injured by simulated military ordnance in a donation box.
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Those stories are meaningful, and they help us understand the stakes of these explosions once the fear of accidentally triggering a trip wire or opening a package subsides. Both individuals who died – House and 17-year-old Draylen Mason – came from prominent Black families who knew one another.
