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Austin Bomber Had a List of Other Potential Targets The Dramatic Last Hours as Agents Stalked the Austin Bomber
(about 2 hours later)
AUSTIN, Tex. — Mark Conditt, who terrorized this city for nearly three weeks with a series of deadly bombings, left behind evidence of potential future targets before he killed himself on Wednesday, a law enforcement official said on Friday. AUSTIN, Tex. — It was past midnight when the call finally came crackling over the radios of agents pursuing the man who had been terrorizing Austin with his homemade bombs. An officer had sighted an aging red Nissan Pathfinder in the parking lot of a Marriott Courtyard hotel in suburban Round Rock, Tex.
Officials were examining these future targets as part of the investigation. The official declined to describe these targets in detail, but said they were a mix of locations that had no common thread linking them. The radios went silent for a moment as officers in a fugitive task force organized by the United States Marshals Service pondered whether they had found their suspect, Mark Conditt, 23, who had been identified by surveillance footage. Within minutes, Austin’s police department mobilized a SWAT team to proceed to the site.
On Wednesday, Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the future targets included residences. “They found a list of residences that they had to assume may have been utilized as future targets,” Mr. McCaul said. Stay away from the red S.U.V., warned the marshals, veterans of outlaw hunts across the Texas badlands who have seen how such things can go.
On Friday, law enforcement officials said they were still evaluating evidence and leads from the public in an effort to build a timeline of the bomber’s activities. But they appeared to be learning little about Mr. Conditt’s motives. “We were trying to plan a safe approach, a Murphy’s Law plan for everything that could go wrong,” said Brandon Filla, a deputy marshal from the service’s office in Austin. “He could have been doing surveillance on his vehicle from a window in the hotel, ready to blow up anyone who went near it.”
“I think everybody is searching for answers,” said Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, who said the authorities were focused on learning what had compelled Mr. Conditt to act and whether he had any accomplices. The team had been tracking the suspect for hours, clued to his location by his cellphone, scouring every hotel and restaurant in the area. They knew the explosive packages he had planted, six in all, that had left two people dead and four others injured.
“Obviously the questions — the big ‘why’ questions as well as the smaller ‘why’ questions, of globally, what precipitated this and what he was trying to do, but also the whys of why this person or that person or that house,” Mr. Adler said. “And we don’t have answers to those questions.” “We knew what the suspect was capable of,” Mr. Filla said.
Over three weeks, the authorities said, Mr. Conditt placed or mailed six explosive devices, triggering five explosions that killed two people, injured several more and left Austin feeling like a city under siege. One package shipped from Austin exploded in Schertz, Tex., about 65 miles south. Mr. Conditt’s activities came to a fiery end early Wednesday morning when, the police said, he detonated another explosive device in the sport utility vehicle he was driving as law enforcement agents pursued him. The story of how law enforcement agents were finally able to stop the bomber’s deadly spree emerged Friday, as the police continued to review evidence recovered at the suspect’s home in nearby Pflugerville, Tex., and began to release details of an operation that ended in a fatal confrontation near the hotel in Round Rock. The work of the marshals was but one part of an extraordinary puzzle that made up the last 24 hours of the serial-bomber investigation.
In Austin on Friday, a sense of relief and a slow return to normalcy was mixed with lingering unease over how Mr. Conditt had selected the recipients of the package bombs. Both of the men killed in the explosions, Anthony Stephan House, 39, and Draylen Mason, 17, were black, and some residents wondered if Mr. Conditt had intentionally chosen African-American victims. (Another bomb injured a Hispanic woman, and an additional bomb was placed in a largely white community.) In the predawn hours of Wednesday, emotions were on edge among the dozens of officers lying in wait. Some had hardly slept in days. Like other residents of this fast-growing city, they had grown apprehensive about going near anything resembling a package. Pressure to catch Mr. Conditt was growing intense.
Mr. Adler, the mayor, said “there’s just not enough data points to know” whether Mr. Conditt was driven by racial animus to target minorities. Was he inside the hotel? Mr. Filla wondered.
“I don’t think we know how he picked the addresses or locations that he sent packages to,” Mr. Adler said. “So I’m not sure it would be accurate to say he was targeting. We don’t know the answer to that, is my understanding.” Agents checked with the hotel management, who confirmed that Mr. Conditt was not checked in as a guest. They kept their eyes trained on the Nissan in the parking lot. Then an officer peering through binoculars glimpsed exhaust coming out of the tailpipe.
Police said a roughly 25-minute recording discovered on Mr. Conditt’s phone did not explain why he chose the addresses where he placed or intended to send his bombs. But it did provide a dark glimpse into Mr. Conditt’s mind-set in the hours before his death. The headlights were off. But the vehicle started to move out of the lot.
“I wish I were sorry, but I am not,” Mr. Conditt said on the recording, according to The Austin American-Statesman, which cited law enforcement sources familiar with his statements. The authorities knew Mr. Conditt would send or place another homemade bomb — the question was when, not if. A series of leads had brought investigators to him, including surveillance footage inside and near a FedEx store where he had shipped two packages loaded with explosives. Starting with the license plate from a different truck he drove, agents were able to track his cellphone number and the construction gloves he had worn while shipping the bombs.
The Statesman reported that Mr. Conditt had called himself a “psychopath” and said he would blow himself up inside a busy McDonald’s if he thought law enforcement was drawing near. The clues all came together to where Mr. Conditt was on Wednesday morning, in the darkened parking lot off Interstate 35.
In Pflugerville, Tex., the Austin suburb where Mr. Conditt grew up and lived, there was no sign of the officers who had surged into the neighborhood earlier in the week. The showdown started with an apparent mistake.
Police barriers were removed from the yellowish-gold frame house that Mr. Conditt partly restored with his father after the family bought the house about two years ago. Neighbors said Mr. Conditt had lived there for at least a year. At one minute past 4 p.m. on Tuesday, paramedics were notified about an “unknown medical alarm” at Mr. Conditt’s home in Pflugerville. Two paramedics from the Pflugerville Fire Department responded. A person inside the home — it was unclear whom — answered the door and told the medics no one there had called 911. The paramedics cleared out at 4:11 p.m.
The 1950s-era house appeared unoccupied Friday morning, its front door and windows sealed off with plywood. A deteriorating shed that may have been built as a garage was littered with garden tools, flower pots, cans of white paint and a discarded toilet. From an incident report released Friday by the Pflugerville Fire Department, it now appears that a request by investigators for paramedics to remain near the house was relayed instead as a call for immediate medical aid to the residence. It is possible that Mr. Conditt himself had come to the door or was home at the time, and began to suspect that the authorities were closing in.
A weight rack at the front of the shed held nearly 20 barbell plates, from 25 pounds to 45 pounds. About a dozen shirts, sizes small and medium, were still on hangers and stacked atop a large, empty red toolbox. Finding paramedics at his door could have been the reason Mr. Conditt drove to Round Rock and appeared to be taking steps that signaled he knew the police were on his trail. At some point in the hours to come, he left a roughly 25-minute recording on his phone that officials described as a confession. Law enforcement officials said the miscommunication involving the paramedics was under review.
Two bicycles were parked on a porch at the rear of the house. On Tuesday night, investigators were still sorting through a multitude of tips and blind alleys.
The mayor of Pflugerville, Victor Gonzales, 69, lives about two blocks from Mr. Conditt’s home. He said he and other residents were still coming to grips with the news that their city had been home to the Austin serial bomber. The local, state and federal agents hunting the bomber wondered if he had struck again. About an hour after the paramedics had left Mr. Conditt’s residence in Pflugerville, the team of investigators had converged on a Goodwill store in south Austin shortly after 5 p.m. in response to a report of an explosion. That incident ended up being unrelated: Military-style ordnance that someone had donated had ignited and injured a worker. It took attention away from Mr. Conditt.
“I feel somewhat that Pflugerville has been hurt by this incident and the fact the bomber lived in Pflugerville,” Mr. Gonzales said. “I think this kind of sets a little bit of a crack in the dam, so to speak. Maybe we need to go back, re-evaluate that quality that we want to have in Pflugerville.” But not for long. Later that evening, police closed Main Street in Pflugerville, apparently in preparation for moving in on Mr. Conditt’s house.
It was not until later that they traced his vehicle to the Courtyard Marriott in nearby Round Rock. When Mr. Conditt pulled his Pathfinder out of the parking lot, a stream of vehicles slowly followed. Mr. Filla, the deputy marshal, described it as the opposite of a high-speed chase. Agents, he said, were hoping to capture Mr. Conditt alive and avoid any harm to themselves.
Using what he described as a “tactical vehicle maneuver,” the SWAT team managed to cautiously push Mr. Conditt’s vehicle onto the edge of a service road just off Interstate 35. Officers approached the vehicle, but were stunned by an explosion triggered by Mr. Conditt as they moved in.
“Bomb, bomb, bomb!” some in the vicinity yelled. At one point, one of the officers fired his weapon; another was thrown back by the blast and injured.
Other officers quickly tried backing up their vehicles but found they couldn’t go very far since so many official cars — from the marshals to local police departments, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the F.B.I. — had arrived at the site.
“It resembled a law enforcement funeral procession,” Mr. Filla said. “That’s how many of us were there.”
Hours after it was all over on Wednesday, the Austin police chief, Brian Manley, told reporters assembled nearby that the bomber was dead, although he declined to identify Mr. Conditt at the time.
“Late last night and early this morning, we felt very confident that this was the suspect in the bombing incidents that took place in Austin,” Chief Manley said.
“The suspect,” he said, “is deceased.