Nashville Bomber Anthony Warner was a conspiracy theorist

NASHVILLE – Crystal Deck was opening Christmas presents at her brother’s home 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.

Me. 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.

Mr. 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.

Mr. Warner, authorities said, drove his white, recreational vehicle to Second Avenue North. 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 the motive of Mr. Warner was shrouded in mystery, false information and strange stories poisoned his mind, apparently driving 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.

Mr. Warner, who was 63 when he died, was not one of the angry QAnon followers who adopted the unlikely theory that Donald J. Trump would retain power by defeating 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 the best friend of mr. Warner in his final months, Ms. Deck that some combination of a fatal cancer diagnosis, salted with the belief in conspiracy theories, led to Mr. Warner killed himself in such a cruel way.

“He tried to escape,” she said. Deck said, which 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 Mr. Warner would think in his mind before his death, he had been fixated for years by the idea that alien reptiles inhabiting underground tunnels control the earth, a fantasy spread by a notorious British serial conspiracy theorist. The giant lizards, Mr. Warner said, appears among us as human beings.

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 has 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,” Mr. 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, me. Perry told police she believes Mr. Warner builds bombs in the RV parked outside his home on Bakertown Lane, and Mr. Throckmorton told police that Mr. Warner was able to build explosives. Officers went to his home, but neither Nashville police nor the FBI investigated. A police and municipal review committee is now investigating why.

Credit …FBI via Associated Press

Perry, through attorneys, declined to comment.

Deck (44) called Mr. Warner first met 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 then me. Deck the two bedroom with two bedrooms in mr. Warner began visiting the Antioch area of ​​Nashville, telling her that no one had visited it for 20 years. His distrust of the government dates back to about the same period, as he endorsed the 9/11 conspiracy theory that it was an internal job rather than an al-Qaeda terrorist attack.

It seems to me. Deck that he started at least 20 years ago on the road that led him to downtown Nashville. “He kept saying ‘9/11 is what it did for me,'” she said.

Mr. 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, Ms. 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 met Mr. Warner first met years ago when Mr. Warner worked as a technician for the company, which was then managed by the parents of Lundborg. Mr. Warner, in his twenties, owned a beautiful car and went out with his own cousin, Mr. Lundborg remembers.

“He was a very handsome man then,” Lundborg said. ‘He had long, soft hair, a mustache from’ Magnum, PI ‘. Girls liked him. ”

Mr. Warner soon left to set up his own alarm business and take a client with him, Lundborg said, while his parents felt 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,” she said. Deck said. “He loved how smart he was.”

Mr. Warner also regularly camped in Montgomery Bell 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.

Mr. Warner has compiled countless essays that he has printed out or uploaded to flash drives, and this to me. Deck and other friends and acquaintances spread.

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 Rothchilds of being reptiles. He organizes seminars that end with participants trying to dance the ‘lizard force’ away, says Joseph E. Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami and co-author of a book called “American Conspiracy Theories.”

Now, in hindsight, Mrs. Deck dug up her memory for clues as to what was to come.

By the time she met him, Mr. Warner clearly prepared himself 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. Me. Deck last saw him on Dec. 17 when he showed up at Waffle House to give her his car, a 2007 white Pontiac Vibe, along with the jacket and gloves he was wearing when walking his dog.

He implied that he had little time left.

On Christmas morning, the footage released by the Nashville Metro Police showed that Mr. Warner drove his RV downtown at 1:22 p.m. He parks in a tree-lined street full of Victorian-era warehouses with red bricks and some new buildings with 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 Mrs. Deck said Mr. Warner used shooting sounds as a ringtone on his cell phone.

He apparently used the sound to attract attention that morning, because a computerized female voice – the voice that me. Deck had heard him manipulate weeks before – soon got out of the vehicle and said, ‘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.

Mr. Warner was the only person killed.

Steve Cavendish and Jamie McGee reported from Nashville, Neil MacFarquhar of New York, and Adam Goldman of Washington.

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