What took place in Austin, Texas, was a tragic and bizarre turn of events that led to the deaths of two people and five others getting injured after suspect 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt detonated a series of mail package bombs over the course of several weeks.
Conditt took his own life by detonating a bomb in his car as law enforcement officers were closing in.
He left a 25-minute confession video that made it difficult to dispute that he was behind the attacks, reminiscent of convicted domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Yet, despite the confession video, police are still searching for a possible motive.
That’s where things get a bit dicey. If Conditt’s skin color were 2-3 shades darker and his name were of the Arabic variety, it would be almost clear-cut that he held connections to an Islamic terrorist group like the Islamic State or al Qaeda and that his intent was to wage jihad on the peaceful residents of Texas’s capital.
Instead, Conditt, a young white Christian man who leaned conservative socially and politically, won’t receive the distinction of being a domestic terrorist or committing hate crimes, at least officially. In his confession video, police said that Conditt didn’t make any terror or hate-related references.
Despite the lack of connection to any terror group or intent to commit acts of hate in the name of something like white supremacy, Conditt certainly left that impression with the Austin community and the rest of the country.
Hate crimes and terrorism don’t necessarily need to check every box to have that effect on the group of people the perpetrator is targeting. The standards for meeting a hate crime are actually lower than what most people would argue.
For instance, just in February, 63-year-old Stanley Vernon Majors of Tulsa, Okla., was found guilty of a hate crime for the murder of his Lebanese neighbor, Khalid Jabara. It would be easy to characterize this as a clear-cut hate crime given the fact that a white man murdered a 37-year-old Arab, however, Majors is gay and Jabara was a practicing Christian. Yet, Majors still thought Jabara and his family were targeting him based on the stereotype that radical Muslims, like those in the Islamic State, throw gays off roofs.
Conditt may not have said he hates anyone in his confession video – which, by the way, is still not available for public viewing – yet his actions speak otherwise. The first victims of Conditt’s attacks were African American and Latino, and they occurred in neighborhoods predominantly populated by individuals of those minority backgrounds.
Bottom line: If Conditt said he was a “good person” in his confession video, should we be inclined to believe that he was, despite the people he hurt and killed as a result of his actions? Thanks to law enforcement finding and pushing Conditt to his own demise, we won’t know to the fullest extent what he had planned and who he wanted to hurt. But make no mistake, Conditt is a domestic terrorist who injected hate and fear into his community. It will take time to heal the division that he sowed.
