Lucky Breaks, Video and Pink Gloves Led to Austin Bombing Suspect

By the end of the day Wednesday, police had another tool: A 25-minute confession, left on the suspect’s phone, in which he attempted to describe his odyssey. “It is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point,” the Austin police chief, Brian Manley, said.

Interviews with political leaders briefed on the inquiry, along with briefings from investigators and a federal law enforcement source, shed light on an investigation that saw hundreds of federal agents descend on Austin, gathering and reconstructing bomb fragments, interviewing witnesses and gathering video footage. “We haven’t seen an effort like this in many, many years,” said Christopher H. Combs, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s office in San Antonio.

Officials said Mr. Conditt planted one bomb in the upscale Travis Country neighborhood of Austin on Sunday, and tied the bomb’s tripwire to a “Caution: Children at Play” sign — which he himself put next to the sidewalk and that he bought, along with four others, at Home Depot. Investigators used his cellphone data to put him at the scene of explosions in Austin and also got his Google search history. But officials said the crucial first break came when Mr. Conditt mailed the packages at the FedEx store earlier this week.

Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, said that when Mr. Conditt left the FedEx office, he got into a pickup that had been called in by others as a potential lead. “And then they got the license plate and from there were able to get the cellphone number,” he said, adding that from there, agents could track the cellphone directly, “as a location device.”

Mr. Conditt’s suicide left more questions than answers about who he was, how he became a bomb-maker and why he did it. But Chief Manley seemed to assuage worries about more bombs when he said all seven had been accounted for. Law enforcement officials had worried that Mr. Conditt might have placed or sent additional bombs in the hours before he died. And officials said they were still looking into whether Mr. Conditt had any accomplices.

In the Austin suburb of Pflugerville, where Mr. Conditt grew up and lived, a steady fear persisted throughout the day, even after his death. Neighbors were forced to evacuate from the area surrounding the house Mr. Conditt shared with two roommates after investigators found explosive materials there. They were allowed to return late in the day.

The Austin police said they had questioned Mr. Conditt’s two roommates. One had been released; the other was still being questioned as of Wednesday afternoon. Neither roommate was identified. Outside Mr. Conditt’s parents home in Pflugerville, Detective David Fugitt with the Austin police said Mr. Conditt’s family was cooperating and was allowing investigators to search the property, including several backyard sheds.

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“We don’t have any information to believe that the family had any knowledge of these events,” Detective Fugitt said.

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Pflugerville is a tranquil Austin suburb nearly 20 miles northeast. It is a spacious town of 59,000 that has long made its unusual name with the silent first letter part of its charm, as visitors notice when they pass such businesses as Pfast Lube. At times on Wednesday, Mr. Conditt’s hometown was transformed. Military-style SWAT vehicles sped down the wide avenues. Neighbors and friends said they were stunned that Mr. Conditt was the serial bomber.

“He always seemed like he was very polite,” said Jeff Reeb, 75, who has lived next door to Mr. Conditt’s parents for about 17 years. “It’s extremely shocking. My summation is it doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t make any sense, which, most of these things like this, don’t make any sense.”

Mr. Conditt was a home-schooled student who had attended Austin Community College. He described himself on a blog as “not that politically inclined” but expressed conservative views on issues like gay marriage and the death penalty. Friends and neighbors described him as a loner.

“He was a nerd, always reading, devouring books and computers and things like that,” said Donna Sebastian Harp, who had known the Conditt family for nearly 18 years. “He was always kind of quiet.”

The attacks began when a package bomb detonated on the porch of an Austin home, killing Anthony Stephan House, 39. That was followed 10 days later by two bombs that were found outside homes, one of which killed a 17-year-old man.

The first three bombs were apparently detonated when they were picked up or jostled. Later, on Sunday, a package bomb exploded in the Travis Country neighborhood, set off by the tripwire. The fifth explosion occurred at a FedEx center in Schertz, Tex., outside San Antonio on Tuesday. Another bomb, this one unexploded, was found at another FedEx facility in Austin the same day.

“We do not understand what motivated him to do what he did,” Chief Manley told reporters.

In a mere 19 days, the bombing sprees sparked fear across the Austin and San Antonio regions of Central Texas, evoking the nowhere-is-safe quality of the anthrax mailings of 2001 and the Washington sniper attacks of 2002. For a young man of 23 who did not complete a degree from Austin Community College, his devices and shifting methods as a serial bomber left some of the country’s most experienced federal explosives experts baffled early on in the investigation.

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And yet, that change in his tactics is largely what led police to him.

His first three bombs were hidden in packages that were not mailed but instead placed on people’s doorsteps. His fourth was set off using a tripwire across the Travis Country sidewalk. But his fifth was different — he shipped it from the FedEx store, which captured him on security video, wearing a baseball cap and a black T-shirt and standing at a counter, in addition to other surveillance video from the area. He shipped two package bombs there, and when one of them accidentally exploded at a FedEx center in Schertz, investigators traced the shipments back to the FedEx store, and, ultimately, to him.

After that explosion at the FedEx facility in Schertz, investigators had turned Mr. Conditt from a person of interest into the primary suspect. “Maybe for about 24 hours before his death, they were able to closely monitor him and his movements,” Gov. Greg Abbott told reporters.

Mr. Conditt’s vehicle was traced to a hotel in Round Rock, just north of Austin, Chief Manley said, where a SWAT team surreptitiously surrounded the hotel and called other specialized units.

But the suspect drove away before those teams could arrive. Officers followed the suspect, who stopped in a ditch off Interstate 35, and SWAT officers approached the vehicle on foot.

“The suspect detonated a bomb inside of the vehicle, knocking one officer back” and slightly injuring him, the police chief said. Another officer fired his gun at the vehicle. And investigators began the long process of trying to find the answer that wasn’t in the surveillance video: Why.

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