By Ian Lovett and Drew FitzGerald
Federal authorities on Sunday identified Anthony Warner as the
man responsible for the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville, saying
that they believe the 63-year-old acted alone and died in the
explosion.
Officials said DNA from the scene was matched to Mr. Warner, who
had previously been identified as a person of interest in the
attack. A vehicle identification number from the RV that exploded
was also matched to one registered to him.
"We've come to the conclusion that an individual named Anthony
Warner is the bomber, that he was present when the bomb went off,
and that he perished in the bombing," Donald Cochran, U.S. attorney
for the Middle District of Tennessee, said at a press conference
Sunday.
Officials said they had no evidence that anyone else had been
involved in the attack. No one else was seen coming or going from
the RV that exploded in security footage.
Douglas Korneski, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation's Memphis field office, said investigators haven't
identified Mr. Warner's motive and asked anyone who knew him to
come forward. "Right now we're looking at any and all possible
motives," Mr. Korneski said.
Intelligence officials have considered whether an AT&T Inc.
switching station that the RV was parked outside of was targeted in
the bombing, according to a person briefed on the
investigation.
Speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday morning, 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."
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.
Mr. Warner was first publicly identified as a person of interest
in the case on Saturday. That same day, agents from the FBI and the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives swarmed his
Nashville home, according to Steve Schmoldt, who has lived next
door to Mr. Warner since 1995. He said his deceased neighbor
described himself as a "computer geek."
"He mostly kept to himself," Mr. Schmoldt said. "I never saw
anybody go to his house."
The bombing caused damage to the AT&T switching center and
knocked out phone and internet service in much of Tennessee,
Kentucky and Northern Alabama. The telecom company said Sunday
afternoon that it had restored 96% of its wireless network, 60% of
business service and 86% of consumer broadband and entertainment
services.
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 18:09 ET (23:09 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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