T AT&T Inc

By Ian Lovett and Drew FitzGerald 

BREAKING

The man believed to be responsible for Friday's bombing in downtown Nashville perished in the explosion, Nashville's police chief said Sunday.

Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, owned the recreational vehicle in which a bomb was set off outside of an AT&T switching station, injuring at least three people. Authorities said they are still searching for a motive in the attack, which damaged at least 41 buildings.

(Story below will update)

The person who set off a bomb in a recreational vehicle in downtown Nashville early Christmas morning was likely motivated by a desire to damage a nearby AT&T switching station, the mayor of Tennessee's biggest city said Sunday.

Speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," Nashville Mayor John Cooper said, "To all of us locally, it feels like there has to be some connection with the AT&T facility and the site of the bombing."

Intelligence officials have considered whether the AT&T building was targeted in the bombing, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

Also Sunday, authorities in Rutherford County, outside Nashville, said they were investigating a box truck discovered in a parking lot that was playing similar music to what was heard from the RV before it exploded.

Federal and local investigators have identified a 63-year-old local man, Anthony Quinn Warner, as a person of interest in the case, law-enforcement officials said Saturday.

Authorities are analyzing body tissue found near the scene of the bombing to determine whether it belongs to someone who died setting off the blast.

Steve Schmoldt, who lived next door to Mr. Warner since 1995, said that for years, an RV that resembled the one authorities have released photos of in connection with the bombing was parked outside Mr. Warner's yard. About a month ago, Mr. Warner pulled the RV inside a fenced area of his yard.

The RV is now gone from the property, Mr. Schmoldt said, and federal agents showed up at the house Friday.

Mr. Warner worked at home and described himself as a "computer geek," according to his neighbor. "He mostly kept to himself," Mr. Schmoldt said. "I never saw anybody go to his house."

The bombing, which came after a sound system in the RV warned listeners that an explosive was inside, injured at least three people and damaged at least 41 buildings, one of which was destroyed, according to authorities.

Damage to the AT&T switching station knocked out phone and internet service in much of Tennessee, Kentucky and Northern Alabama. The telecom company said Sunday that more than 75% of mobility sites affected by the explosion had been restored and portable cell sites were being used to help provide coverage in other areas. Workers pumped more than 3 feet of water out of the damaged building's basement, and 24 trailers with disaster recovery equipment are en route as the company works to restore internet and landline phone service.

Switching centers, also known in the industry as "central offices," represent vulnerable spots in the country's telecommunications infrastructure because of the important equipment they house and how close they often are to busy downtown business districts. Many are hulking brick-and-concrete structures built several decades ago when the original AT&T monopoly employed thousands of human operators to route customers' phone calls.

Digital equipment later replaced those operator banks, but the buildings continued to serve as hubs for hard-to-move fiber optic lines that shuttle data. Access to the buildings is strictly guarded, though their owners have less control of the environment outside those centers.

Physical attacks on those network hubs are unusual. However, telephone-pole wires and cellular towers are frequent targets of intentional attacks. Gunshots and vandalism cause several dozen outages in the U.S. each year, according to Federal Communications Commission reports.

Such incidents rarely cause the massive outages that the latest Christmas bombing created. The internet's decentralized structure lets companies route around damage to other parts of the network. An unknown attacker chopped several high-capacity fiber optic lines in Northern California starting in 2014, for example, but the cuts never interrupted service for long.

The center of Nashville's tourist zone is a few blocks away from the explosion, along Lower Broadway, which is lined with honky tonks and other music venues, cowboy boot stores, restaurants and a museum dedicated to country music legend Johnny Cash.

More than 16 million people visited the city last year, 6% more than in 2018, according to the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. Visitors in 2019 directly spent about $7.5 billion in Nashville, according to the business association.

This year, spending on tourism in Nashville is down about $4 billion, said Butch Spyridon, chief executive of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp.

The organization was planning to air a television commercial at the end of the month to lure tourists to the city, but now staff are debating whether to pull the ad, according to Mr. Spyridon. They have suspended all other advertising. Prospects for the city's tourist business had been hopeful with vaccines being distributed, but "this puts a wrench in the plans," he said.

Several times this year, Mr. Spyridon had thought Nashville tourism was about to start recovering.

"But every time another blow is landed," he said. "We will work our way out of this, but it just got harder and it just got longer."

William Fox, an economist and director of the University of Tennessee's Boyd Center for Business & Economic Research, said Saturday that Tennessee's overall economy has weathered the pandemic well but Nashville has struggled because of its dependence on tourism.

Asked about the explosion's impact on the city's economy, Mr. Fox said, "It won't really have a big impact. People will realize pretty quickly that it's an isolated event."

Rachael Levy and Cameron McWhirter contributed to this article.

Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com and Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 27, 2020 17:34 ET (22:34 GMT)

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