‘Serial Bomber’ Is Suspected in Explosions That Have Put Austin on Edge
March 20, 2018 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
More than 500 officers and agents have been called in to assist with the investigation, including F.B.I. profiling experts from Quantico, Va., who were trying to build a profile of a possible perpetrator, said Christopher Combs, special agent in charge of the bureau’s San Antonio office.
“We don’t know why the bomber is doing this. We don’t know his reasons,” said Mr. Combs, adding that the authorities were especially hoping to understand why whoever was behind the bombings was wielding “this level of violence.”
“We would really like the bomber to contact us so we can talk to him,” he said.
So far, the police have been alerted to more than 600 packages deemed suspicious, as residents have phoned and emailed friends and family to verify the provenance of parcels before opening them.
Chief Manley signaled that the authorities could be getting closer to labeling the attacks as domestic terrorism. “We will have to determine if we see a specific ideology behind this, or something that will lead us along with our federal partners to make that decision,” he said.
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Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
He said the fourth bombing demonstrated a higher level of sophistication than the previous three, as well as a “significant change” in the way the victims were targeted.
In the first three bombings, cardboard boxes were discovered outside homes, seeming to target specific individuals. The packages were not delivered by the Postal Service or any other package delivery company, but instead appeared to have been left outside overnight. They detonated when they were handled by the people who discovered them.
The fourth bomb, however, which exploded on Sunday, was left on a roadside, and was believed to have been detonated with the use of a tripwire by two random passers-by, Chief Manley said. He warned residents that a future bomb could also be connected to a tripwire, which can be fashioned from hard-to-see materials such as fishing line or filament.
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“We have a high degree of confidence that the same individual built all these devices,” Fred Milanowski, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Houston, told reporters.
He declined to discuss details of the latest bomb’s construction, but described the way that tripwire explosive devices are assembled.
“In general, the tripwire is going to be attached to a switch, and it’s going to be anchored down on the other side, obviously, so that when somebody actually trips on it, they will activate that switch,” he said. “That’s why we call it a victim-activated device. It’s random. It’s not targeted. The randomness that a child could have come across that is very concerning to us.”
With so little known about who is behind the attacks and whether they will continue, the city is on edge, with many residents appearing unsure of whether to proceed with normal life or stay in hiding.
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“I think everyone in Austin is in the process of trying to figure out exactly how nervous to be,” said Stephen Harrigan, an author and essayist who has lived in Austin for more than 50 years and whose home is about eight miles from the scene of Sunday’s explosion.
“Are these bombings targeted acts of murder with a specific motive behind them — which is horrible enough — or do they represent something broader and more random?” he said.
Thad Holt, 76, who lives in the gated condominium community of 5000 Mission Oaks a few miles from Sunday’s bomb site, said an occasional car break-in is the kind of crime most typical in the neighborhood.
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Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
“It’s too close for comfort,” Mr. Holt said. “It sort of puts you on edge. It puts the whole town on edge.”
Richard Herrington, 75, a retired pharmacist who lives about a half-mile from the blast site, said he and his family had gone hiking Sunday afternoon near the street where the tripwire was set and went off later that evening.
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“My oldest granddaughter, age 7, said, ‘Grandpa, I want to walk on the street where there’s the most shade,’” Mr. Herrington said. “We could have very easily walked down that street because there is shade. We could have been on that street and maybe the tripwire was there already, I don’t know. I’m anxious for our community because we don’t know when and where it’s going to happen again. I feel like it will happen again.”
At about 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, Mr. Herrington said, he and his wife were watching an N.C.A.A. basketball game when the blast occurred. “I was in the military. Never in combat. If you’ve been in the military and you hear a mortar round go off, it has a thump. And that’s how I knew it was a bomb, because it was a distinctive thump like that.”
The four neighborhoods where the explosions have occurred are varied economic and demographic slices of Austin. The first three bomb scenes were in largely working- and middle-class sections of northeast and east Austin, with sizable black, Hispanic and Asian populations. Hammocks and baby swings hang from tree branches on front lawns near Haverford Drive, the site of the first bombing on March 2. The explosion on Sunday took place in Travis Country, an upscale planned community that is largely white. It is a hilly and wooded area near a patchwork of busy highways and parkways.
After the first three bombings, many community leaders and residents speculated that the attacks appeared to be hate crimes, because those injured were black and Hispanic.
The first package killed Anthony Stephan House, a 39-year-old black man, after he discovered it outside his home. The second targeted two more African-Americans — Draylen Mason, 17, who was killed, and his mother, who was critically injured after she brought the package inside from their front porch and opened it in the kitchen. The third left a 75-year-old Hispanic woman seriously injured.
The explosion Sunday, which injured two white men, suggested that the bomber or bombers were driven by something other than racial bias.
In Monday’s news conference, the authorities said they had received a large number of tips on who could be behind the attacks, but that so far, none had led to the identification of a suspect.
In news conferences, officials have begun to take the unusual step of appealing to the bomber or bombers directly.
“I will reach out to the suspect or suspects and ask that you contact us,” Chief Manley said. “There are innocent people getting hurt in this community and it needs to come to a stop.”
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