NASHVILLE, Tennessee. Crystal Deck opened presents at her brother’s home on Christmas morning when she heard the news that a huge explosion had torn through the historic heart of Nashville.
She knew immediately that the bomber was her beloved friend, Anthony Q. Warner, and quickly began gathering clues that he dropped, including a series of peculiar episodes that she dismissed as unimportant, but which were central to his suicide plot.
Deck had found him weeks before with a pre-recorded female voice on his lap. And he played her the Petula Clark hit “Downtown” in 1964, praising the “meaningful spirit” of the song. Both became strange elements of the bombing.
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Warner even warned her that he was hatching something that would bring the police to her door, but until that moment she did not understand the scope of his plan.
“I just texted him a Merry Christmas,” she cried.
According to authorities, Warner drove his white, recreational vehicle to Second Avenue North in the early hours of the morning. The blast damaged about 50 buildings, some collapsed and cut off the ancient brick facades, which took years and tens of millions of dollars to repair. Two months later, the blast site remains a tangled, abandoned patchwork of planted buildings, cyclone fences and uneven reconstruction efforts.
The blast in front of an AT&T hub paralyzed mobile, Internet and cable services in different states for two days, highlighting the vulnerability of such common but still unprotected facilities.
Although Warner’s motive was shrouded in falsehood, false information and strange stories poisoned his mind and apparently drove him to spectacular violence. This mindset has become alarmingly well-known among law enforcement officials who now reckon with the destructive power 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 one of QAnon’s fierce followers who adopted the unlikely theory that Donald Trump would stay in power and defeat a satanic cabal. He was a computer specialist with a deep distrust of the government, according to his own writings and those who knew him. As a loner, he made at least one female friend feel that he was being manipulated and scared. And he cultivated a bizarre obsession with shape-shifting lizards and a dense forest of other peculiar ideas.
As Warner’s best friend in his final months, Deck believes that a combination of a fatal cancer diagnosis salted with a belief in conspiracy theories led Warner to kill himself in such a brutal way.
“He tried to escape,” said Deck, who is not considered a suspect. “He talked about his own conditions.”
The FBI and other federal and local law enforcement agencies investigating the bombing have not released any findings, though officials said they expect a report by early March.
Whatever Warner had in mind before his death, he had been fixated for years on the idea that alien reptiles inhabiting underground tunnels controlled the earth, a fantasy spread by a notorious British serial conspiracy theorist. The giant lizards, Warner said, appear among us as humans.
By the summer of 2019, he was increasingly making a friend, Pamela Perry, anxious, according to Raymond Throckmorton III, a Nashville attorney who represented both Perry and Warner on various issues.
“Pam Perry had numerous contacts with me where she was just emotionally upset and just really swept into a frenzy of emotion by seemingly crazy things or threatening or unusual things Tony said to her,” Throckmorton said. “I think he just felt like she was at a weak point in her life and that he could dominate, manipulate or control someone.”
In August 2019, Perry told police she believed Warner was building bombs in the RV parked outside his home on Bakertown Lane, and Throckmorton told police Warner was capable of building explosives. Officers went to his home, but neither Nashville police nor the FBI investigated. A police and municipal review committee is now investigating why.
Perry, through attorneys, declined to comment.
Deck, 44, only met Warner a few months later when he came to the South Nashville Waffle House where she worked. “The first time I met him, I thought his cornbread wasn’t really done in the middle, and that he was a little away,” she said.
She described two different sides to him.
There was the man who stuck countless hours on his computer and stabbed himself in eccentric yards.
But there was also the man who tied the windshield wipers to her Nissan pickup, repaired her computer, paid the tab for dozens of other meals at the Waffle House, and took her Yorkie Bubba for a walk in the park.
But when Deck Warner’s two-bedroom duplex in the Antioch area of Nashville began to visit, he told her no one had visited it in 20 years. His distrust of the government had about the same period, as he endorsed the 9/11 conspiracy theory that it was an internal job rather than an al-Qaida terrorist attack.
It seems to Deck that he started on the road that led him to downtown Nashville at least 20 years ago. “He kept saying ‘9/11 is what it did for me,'” she said.
Warner grew up in Nashville and attended local Catholic schools. He served two years in the Navy, in the mid-1970s. He never mentioned his family, except for one dead brother, Deck said. His mother and sister did not want to be interviewed.
Tom Lundborg, 57, who runs an electronic security firm in Nashville, said he first met Warner years ago when Warner worked as a technician for the company, then managed by Lundborg’s parents. Warner, in his twenties, owned a beautiful car and went out with his own cousin, Lundborg recalls.
“He was a very handsome man at the time,” Lundborg said. ‘He had long, soft hair, a mustache from’ Magnum, PI ‘. Girls liked him. ”
Warner soon left to set up his own alarm business and take a client with him, Lundborg said, making his parents feel exploited.
He also became entangled with his own family and became embroiled in a court battle with his elderly mother in 2019, after he wanted to give away the house of his deceased brother, where she lived.
In recent years, he has made money through freelance IT work for local businesses, including answering service calls. “He was very proud of his computer skills,” Deck said. “He loved how smart he was.”
Warner also regularly camped in Montgomery Bell State Park, west of Nashville, a pastime that fueled his conspiracy obsession – he considers the park the most important place for hunting alien reptiles.
He described that they had struggled to locate them with an infrared device and believed that they would be able to adjust their body temperature to the surrounding environment, warning that bullets would only bounce off. “If you try to hunt one, you will realize that you are the hunter,” he wrote.
Warner compiled countless essays that he printed out or uploaded to flash drives and distributed to Deck and other friends and acquaintances.
American conspiracy theories that attract a wide audience tend to be built around historical events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, while the notion of shape-shifting lizards remains obscure.
The idea got fans in the late 1990s after a notorious British conspiracy theorist, David Icke, wrote about it and accused Queen Elizabeth II, the Bush dynasty and the Rothschilds of being reptiles. He organized seminars that ended with participants trying to dance the ‘lizard force’ away, “said Joseph Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami and co-author of a book called American Conspiracy Theories.
Now, looking back, Deck drags out her memory for clues as to what was to come.
By the time she met him, Warner was clearly preparing for a transition. He largely emptied his house, except for an air mattress and a computer in the living room.
He indicated that he had been diagnosed with cancer, but she did not struggle.
In early December, he sent a letter to his IT clients in which he said he was retiring. He gave his house to the daughter of a former girlfriend. Deck last saw him on December 17 when he arrived at the Waffle House to give her his car, a 2007 white Pontiac Vibe, along with the jacket and gloves he was wearing when he walked her dog.
He implied that he had little time left.
On Christmas morning, footage released by the Nashville Metro Police showed that Warner was driving his RV downtown in 1:22 p.m. He parks in a tree-lined street filled with warehouses with red bricks in the Victorian era and some new buildings that house restaurants, apartments and souvenir shops. It runs perpendicular to Broadway, known for its brightly lit honky tonks and live music, which is the main attraction for tourists.
Several residents, who were awakened by a loud, rapid-fire shooting around 4:30 a.m., called police. The officers who responded found no indication of the shots, and Deck said Warner used shooting sounds as a ringtone on his cell phone.
He apparently used the sound to get attention that morning, because a computerized female voice – the voice Deck had heard manipulating him weeks before – soon began to get out of the vehicle, saying, ‘Stay away from this vehicle, evacuate now. Do not approach this vehicle! “The police evacuated as many residents as they could.
The voice, more insistent, announced that the vehicle would explode. It started with a 15-minute countdown, interspersed with constant evacuation warnings as well as excerpts from the song “Downtown”.
“When you are alone and life makes you lonely, you can always go downtown.”
At 6:30 a.m., a large fireball erupted around the RV, and the resulting concussion shook the area. Its scattered residents had already largely escaped on a holiday morning amid a pandemic, managed to escape before the explosion.
Warner was the only person killed.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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