More than a year before a man detonated a bomb that exploded in Nashville, Tennessee, at Christmas, his girlfriend warned the police that he was building bombs on a recreational vehicle parked at his home, according to police reports.
On August 21, 2019, the lawyer for the suspect’s girlfriend, Anthony Warner, told police officers that Warner “frequently talks about the military and bomb making,” according to an incident report released by the Police Department. Metro Nashville.
The lawyer’s call led police officers to visit Warner’s home, where they knocked on the front door to no avail, according to the report. Police officers wrote that they spotted “several security cameras and wires connected to an alarm at the front door,” the report said.
Police said they saw a trailer parked behind a fence in the yard, but said they could not see the vehicle’s interior. Authorities identified a trailer linked to Warner as the source of the Christmas Day explosion.
Police said on Wednesday that police officers saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter the property or the fenced yard. They also determined that the girlfriend needed “psychological assessment” and she was taken to a hospital, according to police.
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The day after the officers visited Warner’s home, a report of the incident was forwarded to the FBI by the police, who said they had asked the agency and the Department of Defense to search Warner’s records. Police said a search of both databases found no results.
The Nashville Metro Police Department did not say that it asked the FBI to open an investigation into Warner, but said that its Hazardous Devices Unit followed up on the incident report with the lawyer. According to the police, the lawyer told the department that Warner “didn’t call the police” and would not allow a visual inspection of the trailer.
David Rausch, director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, told reporters this week that Warner was not on the agency’s radar before the bombing – except for a marijuana possession arrest in 1978.
A Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesman told NBC News on Wednesday that they were previously unaware of the incident involving the Nashville Metro Police Department and Warner’s girlfriend.
The spokesman said in a statement, “to be clear, the comments that our director made about him ‘not being on our radar’ were specific to our agency and not to all police authorities.”
Unlike other cases, such as the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, or Orlando Pulse Nightclub sniper, Omar Mateen, the FBI said it was only asked to search the Warner database and not was asked to open an investigation.
The Metro Nashville police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Warner, 63, who was described as a “loner” by people who knew him, had recently retired as an information technology consultant, NBC News reported on Monday.
Police officers were responding to reports of gunfire in the area on Christmas morning when, instead, they heard an explosion warning coming from a trailer parked in front of an AT&T building. Authorities said the blast, which authorities believe was triggered by Warner, occurred at 6:30 am last Friday, hitting several blocks in downtown Nashville.
The explosion injured at least three people and damaged more than 40 nearby businesses. Warner was the only person killed in the explosion.
