NASHVILLE – The Crystal Deck was opening presents on Christmas morning at his brother’s house when he heard the news that a huge explosion had hit downtown Nashville.
She knew immediately that the bomber was her dearest friend, Anthony Q. Warner, and quickly began to fit the clues he had missed, including a series of peculiar episodes that she dismissed as inconsequential, but that proved central to your suicidal plan.
Mrs. Deck, weeks before, found him playing with a female voice pre-recorded on his laptop. And he played Petula Clark’s 1964 hit “Downtown”, praising the “significant spirit” of the song. Both became strange elements of the bombing.
Mr. Warner even warned her that he was up to something that would bring the police to her door, but until that moment she had not understood the magnitude of her plan.
“I had just texted him ‘Merry Christmas!'” She said, crying at the memory.
Warner, officials said, drove his white recreational vehicle with an explosive trap to Second Avenue North at dawn. The detonation damaged some 50 buildings, tearing down some and tearing off the old brick facades of others that will take years and tens of millions of dollars to restore. Two months later, the blast area remains a messy and desolate patchwork of boarded-up buildings, cyclone fences and uneven reconstruction efforts.
The explosion, in front of an AT&T hub, paralyzed cell, internet and cable service in several states for two days and highlighted the vulnerability of these common, but unprotected facilities.
Although Warner’s motive remains shrouded in mystery, false information and bizarre stories have poisoned his mind, apparently leading him to spectacular violence. This mentality has become alarmingly familiar to law enforcement officers, now considering the destructive strength of conspiracy theories that are endlessly mutating online and played a role in the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.
Warner, who was 63 when he died, was not among the angry followers of QAnon who came to believe the unlikely theory that Donald J. Trump would retain power by defeating a satanic cabal. He was a computer expert with a deep distrust of the government, according to his own writings and those who knew him. Lonely, he made at least one friend feel manipulated and scared. And he had cultivated a bizarre obsession with shape-shifting alien lizards and a dense forest of other peculiar ideas.
As Warner’s best friend in his final months, Deck believes that some combination of a fatal salty cancer diagnosis and a belief in conspiracy theories has led Warner to kill himself in such a brutally spectacular way.
“He was trying to escape,” said Deck, who is not considered a suspect. “He talked about going out on his own terms.”
The FBI and other local and federal law enforcement agencies investigating the attack have not released any findings, although officials said they expected a report in early March.
Anything else that might have been in Mr. Warner’s mind in the period leading up to his death, he had for years fixed on the notion that alien reptiles that inhabited underground tunnels controlled the Earth, a fantasy spread by a notorious serial conspiracy theorist. British. Giant lizards, said Warner, appeared among us as humans.
In the summer of 2019, he was making a friend, Pamela Perry, increasingly anxious, according to Raymond Throckmorton III, a Nashville lawyer who represented Perry and Warner on a number of issues.
“Pam Perry had several contacts with me, in which she was emotionally upset and really immersed in a frenzy of emotion over things that were apparently crazy or threatening or unusual things that Tony had said to her,” said Throckmorton. “I think he realized that she was in a weak spot in life and that she was someone he could dominate, manipulate or control.”
In August 2019, Ms. Perry told police that she believed Warner was building bombs in the trailer parked in front of his home on Bakertown Lane, and Throckmorton told police that Warner was capable of building explosives. The officers went to his home, but neither the Nashville police nor the FBI carried out an investigation. A police and municipal review committee is now examining why.
Mrs. Perry, through lawyers, declined to comment.
Mrs. Deck, 44, met Mr. Warner several months later, when he went to South Nashville Waffle House, where she worked. “The first time I met him, I just thought his corn bread wasn’t really ready in the middle and he was a little bit crazy,” she said.
She described two distinct sides to him.
There was the man who spent countless hours glued to the computer, immersing himself in eccentric plots.
But there was also the man who fixed the windshield wipers on his Nissan pickup, fixed his computer, paid the bill for dozens of other customers at the Waffle House and took his yorkie, Bubba, for a walk in the park.
But when Deck started attending Warner’s two-bedroom duplex in Nashville’s Antioch area, he told her that no one had visited him in 20 years. His distrust of the government dated more or less to the same period, as he subscribed to the 9/11 conspiracy theory that it was an inside job, not an Al Qaeda terrorist attack.
To Mrs. Deck, it looked like he had walked the path that led him to downtown Nashville at least 20 years ago. “He went on to say, ‘9/11 is what did this for me,'” she said.
Mr. Warner grew up in Nashville, attending local Catholic schools. He served two years in the Navy in the mid-1970s. He never mentioned his family, except about a dead brother, Deck said. His mother and sister declined to be interviewed.
Tom Lundborg, 57, who runs a Nashville-based electronic security company, said he met Warner years ago when Warner worked as a technician for the company, then run by Lundborg’s parents. Warner, in his 20s, had a nice car and was dating his own cousin, Lundborg recalls.
“He was a very handsome guy at the time,” said Lundborg. “He had long, fluffy hair, a ‘Magnum, PI’ mustache. The girls liked him. “
Warner soon left to start his own alarm business and took a client with him, said Lundborg, leaving his parents feeling exploited.
He also got involved with his own family, getting involved in a legal battle with his elderly mother in 2019, for example, after trying to donate his late brother’s house, where she lived.
In recent years, he has made money working as an IT freelancer for local businesses, including answering service calls. “He was very proud of his computer skills,” said Deck. “He loved how smart he was.”
Warner also regularly camped at Montgomery Bell Park, west of Nashville, a pastime that fueled his conspiratorial obsessions – he considered the park to be a prime site for hunting alien reptilians.
He described the struggle to locate them with an infrared device, believing that they could adjust their body temperature to the surrounding environment, and warned that the bullets would simply hit. “If you try to hunt one, you will find that you are the one being hunted,” he wrote.
Mr. Warner composed countless essays that he printed or loaded onto thumb drives, distributing them to Mrs. Deck and other friends and acquaintances.
American conspiracy theories that attract a large audience tend to be built around historical events like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, while the notion of shape-changing lizards remains unclear.
The idea gained adherents in the late 1990s after an infamous British conspiracy theorist, David Icke, wrote about it, accusing Queen Elizabeth II, the Bush dynasty and the Rothchilds of being reptilians. He organized seminars that ended with participants trying to ward off “lizard power”, said Joseph E. Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami and co-author of a book called “American Conspiracy Theories”.
Now, in retrospect, Mrs. Deck searches her memory for clues as to what was to come.
When she met him, Mr. Warner was clearly preparing for a transition. He had practically emptied his home, except for an air mattress and a computer in the living room.
He hinted that he had been diagnosed with cancer, but she didn’t meddle.
In early December, he sent a letter to his IT customers, saying he was retiring. He donated his home to the daughter of an ex-girlfriend. Mrs. Deck last saw him on December 17th, when he showed up at the Waffle House to give her his car, a white Pontiac Vibe 2007, along with the jacket and gloves he used to walk her dog.
He hinted that he had little time.
On Christmas morning, images from surveillance cameras released by the Nashville Metropolitan Police showed that Mr. Warner was driving his trailer downtown at 1:22 am. He parked on a tree-lined street full of red-brick warehouses from the Victorian era and some new buildings that house restaurants, condos and souvenir shops. It is perpendicular to Broadway, known for its well-lit honky-tonks and live music, the main attraction for tourists.
Several residents, awake at about 4:30 am with what sounded like quick and loud bursts of gunfire, called the police. Police officers who responded found no indication of gunshots fired, and Ms. Deck said that Warner used gun sounds as a ringtone from his cell phone.
He apparently used the sound that morning to attract attention, because a female computerized voice – the voice that Mrs. Deck heard him manipulate weeks before – soon started to emanate from the vehicle, saying: “Stay away from this vehicle, evacuate now. Do not approach this vehicle! ”The police evacuated as many residents as possible.
The voice, more insistent, announced that the vehicle would detonate. A 15-minute countdown began, interspersed with continuous warnings to evacuate, as well as excerpts from the song “Downtown”.
“When you are alone and life is leaving you alone, you can always go downtown.”
At 6:30 am, a surveillance video showed, a giant fireball erupted around the RV and the resulting concussion shook the neighborhood. Already largely deserted on a holiday morning amid a pandemic, its scattered residents managed to escape before the explosion.
Mr. Warner was the only person killed.
Steve Cavendish and Jamie McGee reported from Nashville, Neil MacFarquhar of New York, and Adam Goldman of Washington.