Nashville Christmas Bombing
An exploding RV did substantial property damage but caused only minor injuries to bystanders.
News of an early-morning explosion in downtown Nashville began spreading nationally around 10 Eastern when police announced that it was “intentional.” The signs thus far don’t point to terrorism but the motive remains unclear.
AP (“Downtown Nashville explosion knocks communications offline“):
A recreational vehicle parked in the deserted streets of downtown Nashville exploded early Christmas morning, causing widespread communications outages that took down police emergency systems and grounded holiday travel at the city’s airport.
Police were responding to a report of shots fired Friday when they encountered the RV blaring a recorded warning that a bomb would detonate in 15 minutes, Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said. Police evacuated nearby buildings and called in the bomb squad. The RV exploded shortly afterward, Drake said.
“This morning’s attack on our community was intended to create chaos and fear in this season of peace and hope. But Nashvillians have proven time and time again that the spirit of our city cannot be broken,” Mayor John Cooper said at a news conference after issuing a curfew for the area.
Unless he knows a lot more than authorities are making public, we have no idea what the intention was.
Police believe the blast was intentional but don’t yet know a motive or target, and Drake noted that officials had not received any threats before the explosion.
The chief said investigators at the scene “have found tissue that we believe could be remains, but we’ll have that examined and let you know at that time.” Police could not say whether it potentially came from someone inside the RV.
Here’s where it gets truly interesting:
Surveillance video published on a Twitter account Friday that appeared to be across the street from the blast captured the warning issuing from the RV, “… if you can hear this message, evacuate now,” seconds before the explosion.
The blast sent black smoke and flames billowing from the heart of downtown Nashville’s tourist scene, an area packed with honky-tonks, restaurants and shops. Buildings shook and windows shattered streets away from the explosion near a building owned by AT&T that lies one block from the company’s office tower, a landmark in downtown.
“We do not know if that was a coincidence, or if that was the intention,” police spokesman Don Aaron said. He said earlier that some people were taken to the department’s central precinct for questioning but declined to give details.
AT&T said the affected building is the central office of a telephone exchange, with network equipment in it. The blast interrupted service, but the company declined to say how widespread outages were.
The AT&T outages site showed service issues in middle Tennessee and Kentucky. Several police agencies reported that their 911 systems were down because of the outage, including Knox County, home to Knoxville about 180 miles (290 kilometers) east of Nashville.
The Nashville Tennessean (“Nashville explosion: What we know about downtown explosion on Christmas morning“) adds:
Nashville police and fire crews responded to reports of a suspicious RV parked outside an AT&T building near Second Avenue and Commerce Street just before 6 a.m. Friday.
Upon arrival, police said an officer “had reason” to alert the department’s hazardous devices unit, which was en route, when a “significant explosion” happened.
[…]
Officers and witnesses heard a broadcast coming from the RV giving a dire warning: “Evacuate now. There is a bomb. A bomb is in this vehicle and will explode.”
Another report in the paper (“Exclusive: Nashville explosion witness remembers chilling warning from the RV: ‘A bomb is in this vehicle’“) notes that the recorded voice was a woman’s. Additonally, we have this account:
Betsy Williams, who owns the Melting Pot building on Second Avenue, lived in a loft apartment on the third floor of the building near the center of the blast. […] Williams said she awoke at about 4:30 a.m. Christmas morning after hearing what sounded like multiple rounds of loud, rapid-fire gunshots. Later, after more gunshots, Williams said she called 911.
Then, she said, she heard a repeated warning from the RV. “Evacuate now. There is a bomb. A bomb is in this vehicle and will explode,” she remembers the recorded warning saying.
All three reports have anecdotal accounts from those who witnessed the explosion or were awakened by it.
So, the bomb went off very early Christmas morning in a business district, albeit one that has numerous loft apartments on upper floors. Not only was that a time where the minimum toll on human life would be expected, but there was a loud recording warning people of an impending explosion and counting down the time to detonation. Rather clearly, killing people wasn’t the goal here. Therefore, “terrorism,” at least in the way we’ve gotten accustomed to thinking about it, doesn’t seem to fit.
But we also have multiple reports of gunfire well ahead of the recorded warnings.
Was the blast an elaborate scheme to cover up a murder? If so, it was reckless in the extreme. At least one of the people interviewed for the above stories notes that all of his street-facing windows were blown out by the blast; who knows who might have gotten killed?
The added wrinkle here is the proximity to the AT&T hub. The explosion took out communications to police stations and to AT&T customers for miles and, indeed, in at least parts of two states (Huntsville, Alabama isn’t that far away and had outages) for hours. Was that a coincidence or somehow intentional? I’m leaning toward the former because the blast doesn’t seem to have been followed up by taking advantage of the outage in some way.
I have friends in Nashville and have been there more times than I can count. I’ve almost certainly walked the blast area. It’s across the river from Nissan Stadium and a few blocks from the Country Music Hall of Fame, both of which I’ve been to.
I imagine there’s too little left of the RV to make tracing the ownership possible.
Is the license plate visible in any of the surveillance footage?
@CSK: I’ve seen a photo of the RV, although it was at an angle that didn’t show a license plate. But police responded to the scene before the explosion. One presumes they took snapshots of the plate or, if it was missing, the VIN plate.
May not have been the main purpose of this bombing but creating chaos and fear were certainly side benefits. As far as this not being terrorism, what else does one call an indiscriminate bombing? The fact that nobody was killed was just luck.
I would presume no such thing. Having ascertained that the bomb squad was needed, I’m sure their only thought was to GTF outa there.
If the human remains found at the scene did indeed belong to the perpetrator, then this was a suicide bombing. But to what end? The whole point of a suicide bombing is to sacrifice yourself to take out as many others as possible. You certainly don’t broadcast a warning to evacuate the area, and you don’t plan the bomb to go off when it’s pretty certain no one will be around to be blown to smithereens.
@CSK: Have they actually been identified as human remains? Last I read was they were suspected of being.
With out a claim of responsibility I have the feeling this is just the opening gambit and that there is more to come, sooner rather than later.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Half the news stories suggest the remains are human, and the other half only that they may be human. At this point, I’m guessing probably human.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Lots of things are scary. Terrorism requires a political motivation. While the criminal code definition (“the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”) isn’t perfect, it’s reasonable enough.
Got it, thanx. This person was sending a message and in time all will become clear. Of that I am certain.
@CSK:
You’d be surprised. The FBI found sizable pieces of the rental truck used in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing–the rear axle, specifically, was found the next day and it was imprinted with the VIN, which led investigators directly to where it was rented–and that bomb was far more powerful than the one in Nashville.
@Mikey:
Thanks for reminding me. It is indeed possible to make an i.d. even from relatively minute pieces of evidence.
I suspect it has already been established whether the remains are human.
I find it a bit surprising that an attack knocking out emergency response centers. When I was involved in selling support equipment to similar facilities, it needed to be fully redundant, which usually meant mirrored systems with auto fail over, and needed to connect to at least 2 line providers entering the building from different directions, plus microwave.
@Mikey: yeah the VIN is hidden in the engine, transmission, frame, lots of other places.
@CSK:
“If the human remains found at the scene did indeed belong to the perpetrator, then this was a suicide bombing.”
This is what I would guess as well with the information available up to this point.
“But to what end?”
If the human tissue angle proves accurate. An individual (or individuals), with a dangerous set of skills that wanted out in a highly visible fashion, but not wanting to take others with themselves? Definitely a unique event, more forensics will be needed to determine any type of motive of course. At this point I would guess this wasn’t terrorism in the classical sense. Possibly an angry citizen that wanted to show their power without necessarily hurting innocents? I’m sure more will be revealed, but
very intriguing in the interim.
I knew I had to have been near the blast site, but checking the map more carefully my wife and I ate at the BB King’s Blues Club on that same block a couple of years ago.
Man, the things I have learned coming here for the past 10 or so years. Apparently the IRA was not a terrorist group since they used to broadcast warning before a bomb went off to minimize casualties while damaging property. And, also, a direct attack on our communications infrastructure isn’t possibly terrorism either.
@Thomm:
Please note@James Joyner: above on what is terrorism. In deed the IRA is a terrorist organization because they have a political agenda. At this point there is no indication of a political agenda tied to this bombing, you are assuming facts not in evidence.
Again, you’re assuming facts not in evidence. At the moment there is no indication that the CO was the intended target.
@ImProPer:
But if you wanted to go out in a spectacular fashion, you could just drive off a cliff, couldn’t you? Or self-immolate? And whoever this was probably didn’t want a big audience, given the time and location–plus the warning that was broadcast.
Crazy people do crazy stuff. This may never make much sense of this. And with the paltry information at hand, not much point trying.
@Sleeping Dog:..plus microwave.
My last day on the job in the landline telephone industry was 2009 so anything I report about the business is dated.
While microwave circuits were state of the art in 1973 when I started I know that the microwave tower at a GTE Toll Center in Marion, Illinois was removed by 2003 as that was when I noticed that it was gone. Might have been retired for a while before it was taken down. In 1985 I worked with a crew that installed some of the fiber optic cable that ultimately replaced those microwave circuits. I suspect that there were many other toll routes upgraded to fiber optic and towers abandoned over the years.
While redundancy is a priority with communications circuits it was not 100% when I was splicing the copper wires or placing the fiber optic cables at many small landline Telco Central Offices across the country. Ten or twelve years ago, at one site both transmit and receive circuits of copper and fiber optic cables serving a smaller central office just north of where I live ran perpendicular in several separate ducts under the mainline ROW of the Ilinois Central RR (2 tracks). The bores under the tracks were only a few feet apart and the Central Ofice was just a few hundred feet away. A fiber optic placing crew working in the ROW parallel with the RR tracks cut right through all of the cables. It took Telco repair crews at least 2 days to restore all service working around the clock. They had to stop every time a train came by.
@Mister Bluster:
My experience with emergency response centers goes back even further, so microwave may have been an obsolete, but not discontinued technology, so it still needed to accounted for in planning. At that time the centers were looking into multi media contact management, voice, email, text, etc. The RFP came out after I moved on.
@gVOR08:
While this is certainly true, as a species we are lucky that it is rare for a crazy person to have the ability to organize at any significant scale, so when someone truly crazy acts out, the damage tends to be limited.
@CSK:
Great points, at the moment I get a sense that maybe perpetrator wants everyone to simply be perplexed. If this is the case, I’d have to admit, it was pretty well thought out.
Media coverage of emerging events is often pretty wrong for the first few days.
If you just want some entertaining speculation, here you go:
@Teve:
I keep going back to the planning. It’s like something I’d write, not something real world normal. I don’t buy foreign actors, I think it’s entirely domestic. Part of the problem with making political sense of it is that politics no longer makes sense in a world of nut jobs with insane conspiracy theories.
I have a hard time believing the location is incidental. What are the odds of a randomly parked bomb hurting a communications hub? And there is still the possibility of insurance fraud, or even an overwrought murder cover-up.
@Michael Reynolds:
indeed, a friend just said the QAnoners are claiming Dominion voting machines from swing states were being audited in that AT&T building and this is part of a Deep State/Democrat coverup.
@Michael Reynolds:
That’s been my take. The fundamental questions in my mind were and still are “Why a relatively minor city like Nashville, and why that particular street / in front of that particular building?”
At first glance my thought was that this has grudge / grievance written all over it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
(and why, if they have surveillance video basically on top of the thing exploding don’t they also have surveillance video of the nutjobs dropping it off – or of them never getting out of it?)
@Teve:
He seemed pretty methodical till he got to about post 40 and went all Q-anon by settling on, it was an attack on the ATT building and began hyper ventilating. He also dismisses too casually the concept of a dramatic suicide and doesn’t mention the possibility of cover for a murder, with the reports of gunshots, murder can’t be discounted yet.
It is really easy to get to far out in front of the known facts and educated speculation by the professionals on the scene, which is what Alex is doing.
@HarvardLaw92: I only saw one clip of surveillance video but it was very unhelpful.
The following is entirely supposition and speculation.
From the video footage and picture I saw it appears that the truck was parked across the street from the CO and partly across from the parking garage.
The bomb will dramatic, wasn’t powerful enough to knock down the nearby historical buildings. But it did have one hell of a fireball.
Which has me thinking it was a propane explosion. An RV that size would likely have 20-40lbs. of propane on board and about 40 gallons of gasoline. Use the microwave timer as a fuse that turns on the microwave causing a spark, allow the RV to fill with propane gas and boom.
Motive, not enough info to guess.
My initial thought is that it was a suicide, designed to send a message. That eventually they (law enforcement) will identify the vehicle and the owner, and there will turn out to be some kind of online presence to explain it, a ‘manifesto.’
You know, 2020 is turning out to be a very strange and warped year, a slow motion deconstruction – sort of 1968 redux, but without the political assassinations. Strange times.
Another fact: they parked far enough away from Hooters that it was spared from most of the damage.
I doubt it’s a particularly relevant fact, but it is a fact.
My expectation is that it is going to turn out to be someone mad at AT&T for a billing issue, timed at Christmas because they weren’t going to be able to afford to buy Christmas presents, or because they thought an exploding RV would be someone’s Christmas present. No one gets mad enough at the Spaghetti Factory to want to blow it up, but that’s because no one has had to deal with interminable phone trees and customer support at the Spaghetti Factory.
Or QAnon related. Surely the police investigating will find the children in the basement of The Spaghetti Factory.
@Michael Reynolds:
Yes, unlikely anyone would go through all the trouble to create a massive bomb and carefully select the time when the fewest persons would be hurt, create a warning tape..but then decide to do it just anywhere. Best guess is the target was ATT.
Going way out on a rotten limb of speculation: Terrorism would be the wrong word. It looks more like revenge, which was what Tim McVeigh sought, and it appears he or she followed that model. Possibly a disgruntled ex-employee.
@HarvardLaw92:
Indeed. If they have video of the perps they wouldn’t want the perps to know they have it, not until they have them in custody.
Occam’s razor:
* It was made and expoloded because it could be.
* A person has not been found (yet) because it is still relatively easy to hide your actions.
If you can make a bomb and blow it up, there are some that will do so, because they can. More reason than that is not required.
This is why I have little hope for humanity, in the long run.
And since reality, as for as I am concerned, only exists in my lifetime, it the mega-lunatic can hold off for 30 years, then cool with me. All our generation has been living on teh edge of a knife… so nothing’s changed.
http://www.heavy.com/news/anthony-quinn-warner/
Person of interest.
@CSK:
Hard to tell whether he carried a grudge against AT&T or this was just a disaffected loner who picked that spot at random from which to leave the world. I want to hear more about the prior tips to the FBI concerning this guy.
@HarvardLaw92:
CNN is reporting that it seems to have been a suicide bombing. An FBI agent (unnamed) says they are not looking for another suspect.
@Teve:
I should be pretty well known here as one bordering on being a free speech zealot. But I have to admit that there is a special place in hell for people who insist on “writing” a 60+ part Twitter thread instead of writing some coherent prose and then linking it. People who chose to do the former really should be put in the stockade and receive an equal number of lashes to their tweetstorm.
Anyway, it’s too early to tell. There’s not enough data and performative zero-evidence speculation is dumb especially when done on f’ing Twitter, the social media version of pancreatic cancer.
@CSK:
Heavy.com in recent years seems to be pretty good about putting coherent facts together. I’ll still wait for all the facts before definitive conclusions, but it’s looking more like a depressed white guy performative suicide than anything else.
@Andy:
That was my reaction for several years. I was downright hostile to that method. But I’ve spent so many hundreds of hours on Twitter in the last 10 years that it’s become normal to me. I’ve acclimated to it.
IIRC, some young adults in Japan have written entire novels in SMS format.