Nashville Christmas suicide bomber

With the reporting on the Christmas suicide bomber in Nashville, I'm following some of the media narratives without asuming that we have anything close to a full picture of what was going on with the bomber.

Here is a recent report from ABC News, Nashville bombing suspect identified from DNA evidence 12/207/2020:

That segment features one of the standard tropes of such reports, the self-presentation of the police as heroic saviors. There's nothing wrong with recognizing police who do a good job, on the contrary. But police departments are also very experienced in highlighting themselves as efficient public servants in the wake of an immediate crisis. Not so fast to identify shortcoming in their work, which typically only emerge later or not at all.

This report by Natalie Allison shows other tropes familiar from mass shooter events, even though in this case it appears that the suicide bomber actually tried to avoid civilian casualties: Anthony Quinn Warner, self-employed computer guru ID'd as lone Nashville bomber, killed in blast Nashville Tennessean 12/27/2020

A white guy carries out a suicide bombing in downtown Nashville that damages 41 buildings but the press and the authorities are tippy-toeing around calling him a terrorist or even suicide bomber? The post-9/11 press practice of restricting the term "terrorist" to Muslims and/or foreigners. That sloppy press practice has been particularly influential in downplaying the significance of domestic far-right terrorism in the US, which is currently definitely more of risk for violent crime than Muslims or foreigners, not to speak of "antifa".

We also get the trope of interviews with the neighbors. He was quiet. He had dogs. No, say the neighbors, they had no idea that he was any kind of a weirdo. This is the same tape that we hear replayed every time someone like this gets identified. Of course, the neighbors are going to say, no, no, we hardly knew him.

Which is probably true in most cases. Somebody planning a suicide bombing or mass shooting is not likely to go door-to-dorr in his neighborhood blabbing about what he's planning to do. But the same press boilerplate is rolled out over and over. Apparently this man grew up and had lived maybe his entire life in the general neighborhood. Nashville is a city, so it's not infeasible that people in his neighborhood had no particular reason to think he was morphing into a suicide bomber.

But it's also not unusual in these cases to find out that people in contact with him actually did notice odd behavior that at least in hindsight they wish they had taken more seriously. It's also not at all unusual to find out that local police had some contact with the person in a context of some kind of threatening behavior. Or even that the FBI had some information about such threatening behavior. The ABC report above says that "investigators" say "that he was not on any law enforcement agency's radar before this."

But what you are extremely unlikely to hear in a case like this is the police chief holding a press conference a day or two after the incident and saying, "Yeah, half the police force knew this guy liked to git drunk at the bar and brag about how he was gone blow the hell out of the communications network in the city. But, you know, ever'body thought he was just a good ole boy tellin' tall tales."

That ain't gonna happen. Nor will the FBI come out and say, "Oh, we were using him as an informant against local white supremacists. But I guess we didn't keep him on a close enough lease. Sorry, our bad."

It's human to speculate. But we don't know what we don't know. And law enforcement has legitimate reasons to not say everything they know about the incident before they've had time to thoroughly investigate. The ABC report mentions that several sources told him that the suspect may have been motivated by conspiracy theories about 5G technology.

Another dangling thread of the story so far as I've seen is reports of shots fired around of the RV before it exploded: "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." (Nashville bomber blew himself up, police say Politico/AP 12/27/2020)

On part of the story that I find concerning comes from Yihyun Jeong and Cassandra Stephenson, '15 minutes to clear the area': How Nashville police raced to save lives as a bomb ticked down Nashville Tennessean 12/27/2020. A police officer named James Wells reported the following:

Wells began walking toward the RV, when he too, felt a need to change direction.

"I literally hear God tell me to turn around and go check on Topping, who was by herself down on Broadway," he said Sunday, tearing up as he spoke.

He took what felt like three steps, when the music stopped.

He kept walking when suddenly he saw the color orange. And then heard a loud boom.

This kind of religious story offering thanks to God after surviving a dangerous situation is fairly standard in various Protestant religious traditions, especially in the South.

But I'm sorry, when a police officer is talking in public about how he literally got verbal instructions from God, his superiors should make sure he is probably checked medically and psychologically. He may be carelessly using language better restricted to similar believers. Or he may have been suffering some kind of physical effects of the blast.

Or you might also think that someone in his department should at least tell not to blab to the press about his supernatural abilities. It seems like the kind of secret weapon that the police department might want to keep under wraps.

And what if next week the voice in his head tells him to murder some random person? I mean, the cop did say that he "literally" heard God talking to him. I really do favor the idea of a separation between police work and voices in your head.

There's also an odd connection involved in the story, of the kind tabloids love. Warner before his suicide-bombing death transmitted some property to a woman in California who is an entertainment executive, as Christina Zhao and Naveed Jamali report for Newsweek in Anthony Warner, Nashville Bomber, Engaged in Flurry of Mystery Property Deals Before Attack.