In the 2003 detective novel The Murder Room, English crime writer P.D. James allowed that “all the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre, and Loathing.” James accurately assessed motivations that typically accompany a homicide. And any consumer of police dramas on television knows that the discovery of a murder weapon combined with a plausible motive are typically essential elements in proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Yet, motive can be difficult to discern in certain crimes, particularly when the suspect takes his or her own life or is killed by police during an attempted apprehension. With 21st-century forensic science so effective and television dramas such as CSI: [fill in city here] so neatly effective in solving crime mysteries in one concisely packaged, revelatory hour, the public demand for immediate answers is satiated via celluloid simplicity.
But what of the Mandalay Bay hotel Route 91 Harvest music festival mass shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017? We know that 64-year-old Stephen Paddock slaughtered 60 innocents. We still do not know why. We may never.
It also appears that the explosion of a recreational vehicle in Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas morning has some eerily similar motivational vagaries. Via DNA collected at the site of the explosion, authorities have identified Anthony Quinn Warner as the 63-year-old man who drove a camper from his residence in Antioch, Tennessee, into downtown Nashville, played a preemptory warning to bystanders that a bomb would soon be detonated, followed by a recording of Petula Clark’s 1964 hit single “Downtown” before initiating the blast that took his life. Blessedly, the enormous blast caused no other human fatalities. Three people in close proximity were injured. A nondescript AT&T facility, the central office of a telephone exchange, was heavily damaged, knocking out the local 911 system and interrupting service in the surrounding area.
It is believed that Warner acted alone. This is the preeminent concern for law enforcement: Are there any other co-conspirators? Are there any imminent threats from other planted devices?
Once these questions are satisfactorily answered, and here, the answers were no and no, the follow-on investigation by the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and local police is entirely focused on the why. National Review’s Jim Geraghty astutely characterized the baffling case as “creepy, with an almost cinematic sense of timing and drama.” Warner did not act like the bombers I encountered across a 25-year FBI career. Deploying an improvised explosive device typically involves the ultimate quest to exact structural damage to infrastructure or symbology. It also often involves a sinister desire to inflict casualties and ratchet up a body count. Warner seemed bent on neither.
Theories abound. Warner was an IT guy who worked for a real estate firm. With no sign of compensation, he oddly transferred two homes to two different women. The FBI has been conducting interviews centered on whether Warner might have been paranoid about 5G technology. Was the RV parked adjacent to the AT&T building for a particular reason? If so, why not seek better placement than the street in order to effect maximum destructive purpose?
The pre-blast audio warnings indicate Warner did not want to maximize human casualties. If this was a suicide, what an elaborate and somewhat complex effort to take one’s own life. Homicide bombers in the Middle East tend to seek eternal glory, martyrdom by acting as a “human bomb,” and taking as many lives with them as possible. Bombings such as the ones committed by the Weather Underground in the United States during the 1970s and the IRA in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were designed to stoke fear and make political statements.
We have also come to understand that some who commit mass shootings are seeking the posthumous notoriety that accompanies their depraved desire to kill more innocents than the previous reported-on active shooter.
There’s no doubt that Warner remains an enigma at the moment. The immediate speculation was that his actions were an act of terrorism. Yet the FBI has been resolute in not labeling the bombing an act of terror. America has a complicated and tragic history of bombings as a tool of hatred and intersection of political divisions and social justice appeals. As divided as our country is in 2020, once the investigation concluded that the explosion did not appear to be an act of far-right or far-left extremist terror, there were many of us who breathed a sigh of relief, as in, “Whew! Our tribe can’t be blamed for this one.” However, violent extremism helps us understand motivation and piece together causality.
Nashville continues to perplex us.
I just spoke to a former FBI colleague, a retired senior FBI bomb technician. He has analyzed blast sites around the world and in war zones. While viewing publicly available photographs of the scene, he assessed that it did not appear to be a sophisticated device. In his words, they were “probably low-grade explosives and easily-procured bomb parts.” While difficult to assess from the photographs he reviewed, he noted that the charring and copious amounts of black soot residue support this conclusion. His guess is that this was not an experienced bomb-maker. One of the most difficult parts of post-blast analysis, of course, is that the evidence tends to be destroyed in the blast.
Why, some have inquired, is the FBI still the lead investigative agency for a suspected suicide? Simple answer: presidential decision directives (akin to executive orders) 39 and 62, both signed by President Bill Clinton during the 1990s. They essentially give the FBI purview over terrorism investigations. These are some of the few investigations we work backward from with the presumption an incident is terror-related until proven otherwise.
While the Nashville investigation is still going and more answers may be discovered, we may never fully understand the why. It remains a Christmas miracle that we will not be forced to bury any innocent victims this week. Let’s be thankful for that. Let’s also be thankful for the brave first responders in Nashville and hope the investigators arrive at some answers soon.
James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University. Gagliano is a member of the board of directors of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
