Transcription
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People trust the mail system. We get mail, we get the packages, all of those things touch every person. Not only is getting a package at your front door one of the most common things possible, but there's also a level of excitement there.
We begin with breaking news in Northeast Austin. One person is in the hospital after another package exploded hours after the second explosion.
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Realize with a cereal box, eerie. Obama, Obama sowing fear into a community. Your city is under attack. What's gonna be on my porch? What's gonna be mailed to me? Three minority victims. Who would target this person? Are these connected?
All my 911, if you see anything out of place. We have packages in trucks rolling down the interstate. We didn't know how big and bad this could become. It's time to be vigilant. You are racing the clock. The trip wire, your mind's going a million miles an hour. You're gonna stop him now.
Special agents canvassing the scene on the ground in Austin. The ATF surged their national resources over 600 FBI personnel, all hands on deck for us. With a bad paper bag, I told them to not let him get on the interstate. Austin is the 11th largest city in the country.
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We fill ourselves as the live music capital of the world. We have the South by Southwest Music Festival, which is one of the larger music festivals in the country. It's a dynamic city, kind of the Silicon Valley of Texas.
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Most people often feel safe about the city and about their community, but that was shattered on the morning of March 2nd.
"911, do you need pay?"
"I don't know what's going on. My neighbor, something exploded or something. There's blood everywhere. We need an ambulance immediately."
I contacted the officer I was on scene. He said there's an explosion that occurred and if somebody was injured.
Anthe Stefan, 39 years old, goes to his front porch, lifts up a package. The first thoughts that you have as a city police chief is whether it was a hot water heater that exploded or someone welding too close to the tanks. You know, you don't think of the fact that it was an IED.
Obama, has he taken another breath or not? Now, okay, keep going. Every single breath been cleared. I grabbed the bomb truck and our gear and I started heading to that call.
"Neighbor, his bloody supervisor claimed 690 twenty-ninth, transporting CPR still in progress."
The victims going around, rah.
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I got a call from my daughter-in-law and said that Stefan had been hurt, that he had been in an accident, that I needed to get to the hospital. Because of the magnitude of the crime, I was not allowed to see him. No one knew anything. No one would tell us anything. That was the most horrible feeling I had ever, ever experienced.
Medics responded to a man in his 40s with traumatic injuries. He later died at St. David's Round Rock Medical Center. He was dead. I heard a scream. I screamed, and it was through the news, it was through the broadcasting of the news that we heard.
I heard what happened to myself. A bombing is extremely unusual in any city. It does not happen much in the United States. The bomb was heard for two blocks away. That's not a normal situation. A life was taken. The safety of the neighborhood was compromised. A bad situation has already occurred.
We'll make sure to seem safe. I see components that, to a bomb tech, a trained bomb tech, are indicative of an explosive device. Unfortunately, I see blood from the victim. Every post-blast scene, there's a tremendous amount of evidence left behind.
Everybody ready? By the time I arrived on the scene, our federal partners were already there. We already had the FBI, we had the ATF. They were on the scene and we were working.
There is no information that we have right now to believe this is anything other than an isolated incident. Everyone thought that this was one fatal bombing. Anytime you have a homicide case, the first thing you do is start looking at, was there some reason that anyone wanted to have this person killed?
I'm saying, well, how? Who would do this? Why would this happen? And why my son? Why? Why him?
We came up with a theory on the scene. The Austin Police Department's organized crime division had conducted a raid in the weeks leading up to this bombing on a house on that very same street. As a result of that raid, we seized a large amount of cash.
When we looked at that house and we looked at Mr. House's residence, they were very similar in appearance. The stash house had lost quite a bit of money, other people's money. So we didn't know, were they targeting them for retaliation?
So we did have a very early theory this was an intentional act, but they got the wrong house, the wrong victim.
For the next 10 days, law enforcement agencies are still trying to solve this bombing on March 2nd. As they're still working on that case, on March 12th, another bomb goes off.
That Monday morning, I was notified that we had another explosives on the way into work. When the agents in Austin called me and said, "Hey, we have a second bombing. It's consistent with the first one."
This package was out on your front doorsteps.
"Yes, I don't believe this. This is not a family."
This was a young man's beginning in the spice. Police have identified the 17-year-old Raylan Mason as the teenager killed in the second bombing. Police are looking at similarities between this incident and the one on March 2nd in North Austin.
Bombings are extremely unusual. There's no way that it was a coincidence.
How are you?
This one, it was in that moment that I realized that our city was under attack. There is the possibility that these are related. So if you find any suspicious packages, do not handle them.
We're gearing up to start working the second bombing, and we were notified of the third bombing. The box exploded. Now we have another victim. She is a 75-year-old Hispanic woman named Esperanza Herrera.
One woman was injured. She was in critical condition at the hospital but recovering. There was debris all over the street. This device was near that front stoop area when they detonated. Because it was not inside the house, it was outside. It just shot everything all around the neighborhood.
As I recall, it detonated as she stepped up onto her porch. I think that jarring motion of her stepping is what caused the actual detonation.
At the third scene is when I looked at the chief and said, "Chief, we obviously have a serial bomber. We need to set up a national command post here."
Everybody ready? Based on evidence that we have at this scene, as well as at the other two scenes, this evidence makes us believe that these incidents are related.
We do not have a specific victimology or ideology that we have identified, so assigning a motive to this at this point is not possible to do that.
Thank you very much.
Here you have the police chief in a major American city telling all his residents, "Hey, watch out. One of those packages that's on your doorstep could be a bomb." You can imagine the fear that this set throughout the entire city.
Everybody is on edge. When that happened, that was a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood historically.
So, we're saying three minority victims. The victim number two, a young man, is a musical prodigy. You're like, who would target this person? The two first victims were African-American males, and now they have a 75-year-old Hispanic woman.
Are these connected? We've now had a series of bombs. The first one being northeast, the second one central east, the third one southeast.
Austin is a city that was really formed based on segregation. I-35, the major interstate through the city, really was that divider line. When we look at how these bombings started off with the first three events being east of I-35, that became part of the public discussion as well.
We were talking with the Civil Rights Division back at the Department of Justice. We're looking at every idea to figure out what could this be. Bombings, and in particular serial bombers, go to the top of the list as far as fear.
Everywhere you go in the country, what happened in Oklahoma has made people feel more vulnerable. The entire city of Boston is shut down right now. The terrifying situation.
One of the reasons that no serial bombers by name is because there are so few of them. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, an eighteen-year-long search for the Unabomber. Eric Rudolph, the most notorious and persistent fugitive on the FBI's ten most wanted list, spent a year working on the Eric Rudolph investigation.
It took us five years to find that individual. We didn't want to repeat that. That's what law enforcement was so concerned about. They could be chasing this person for years, even decades.
One of our battle cries is this will not be another Eric Rudolph or Unabomber. They're going to end this bombing as quickly as we could.
More than 700 reports of suspicious packages over the last week. A lot of the city feels uneasy. Don't even approach it. Don't even try to handle it. Somebody is out there making explosives that have now killed two people.
Until today, Boston investigators had said there was no threat to the public. Historically, we've gotten communication from bombers. There wasn't a note. We didn't know if it was a single individual or a group.
We really didn't know. Sunday afternoon, we had a press conference. One of the purposes of that was to try to communicate with that bomber and try to get him to communicate with us.
We hope this person or persons is watching and will reach out to us before anyone else is injured or anyone else is killed out of this event.
We never got any direct communication from this bomber. Obviously, he continued to place devices.
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It's about seven and a half miles away from downtown Austin. In fact, from right here, you can see the downtown skyline.
March 18th, I was on the DDI enforcement unit. We were just driving casually, monitoring the radios. Can we confirm there's an explosion or is it still unknown?
There's been an explosion at the real estate sign, and we responded because that's what our job is to do.
"Yeah, ten-four, go ahead, start away, getting all the troops heading your way."
This whole street was lined with federal agents and police cars, a fire truck, quite a little neighborhood.
I walked over, conned towards this area. I don't remember exactly, but I know it was pretty close to here. There was a bicycle in the middle of the street, and these two young men were right here on the sidewalk, looking at them, looking at the fence, and realized that I was looking at shrapnel.
"Hey, we have a shackle."
I had to start thinking like I was a soldier again in Iraq, and I realized that this is a bomb. I just started walking slowly. I shined my flashlight, just looking, and I just started doing what a soldier would do.
I was like, there's got to be something here. You see the line.
"Hey, Dooley, grab a piece of tape right here, a taper coat. It's a trip wire. Stop right there."
We have a confirmed requirement. Everybody needs to hold for their ass. I need nobody else to drive in this intersection.
Approach the intersection. The fourth explosion was in Southwest Austin last night. Two men in their 20s were hurt. Austin police say a trip wire caused a device to explode as they were walking down the street.
This one hit very close to home to me. Literally, it was on the side of town that I live in. This was indiscriminate. Anybody could have walked by. It could have been a three-year-old girl. It could have been an eighty-year-old grandmother.
This bombing seemed to almost be a signal from the bomber to law enforcement. He did not seem to be specifically targeting people of color or any particular ethnicity. These were two white kids in a white suburban neighborhood.
We went from trying to make a connection between three previous scenes. Now we have a device that could target anyone.
The chief called a press conference about 2:00 a.m. in a parking lot to tell everyone, "You got to be careful of everything now."
It's a tough message to deliver to the community. If you see anything that looks out of place, you need to call us because the bomber kept changing his delivery mechanisms, and he kept increasing his level of sophistication.
We didn't know what would be next. We want everyone within a half-mile radius of this intersection of Dongseong Drive and Republic of Texas back here in Travis Country to stay inside your homes until we have had a chance to deem this neighborhood safe.
I remember telling the citizens, "You can't go in your backyard. It's a crime scene." I remember clearly the citizens saying, "We're scared. We're not even sure if we can leave our house safely, and we can't believe this is going on in Austin, in the US."
We slept in our trucks until the next morning when the sun came up, and then we did our sweep for secondary devices to make that scene safe, to clear it for evidence.
The device was placed on the ground, and he covered it, the device with the sign to conceal it somewhat. I immediately noticed some batteries that were consistent with the batteries that were used in other devices.
The trip wire ran across the sidewalk here and was probably only about three inches off the ground, and it was anchored to a metal stake somewhere around this location right here.
This entire wall was just covered with pop marks from the shrapnel that was propelled from the device. We had people of interest throughout this investigation.
The night of the trip wire device, we knew where those people were, and they were nowhere near that. So, unfortunately, in the morning, we start processing that scene. We were at square one.
The bomber, he started trying to think about what's in his head now. Is he mocking us? Is he saying, "Look what I can do?" He or she is telling us, "Hey, I'm ahead of you, and I've got a lot of tricks up my sleeve."
We were on a couple hours of sleep, and we get that call in the middle of the night that there's been another package at the FedEx facility.
Breaking news, a package exploding at a FedEx facility. I got the call from the bomb squad commander of San Antonio, and he said, "Mike, we'd have a device go off in Schertz, which is a suburb just north of San Antonio and the FedEx facility."
This is a fifth blast in the state in under a month. We arrived right away. You're processing in your head, are we gonna clear this scene? There's still packages or social trucks that haven't left.
When the FedEx package detonated at the facility, that provided critical evidence that the subject had changed his MO. That elevated our concerns tremendously because now you're shipping something, and before we knew, they were placed.
This is the sum of all fears for law enforcement because now it shows that the bomber is sending his packages through the mail. The nightmare scenario is they could be anywhere, could be anywhere across the country.
God forbid, give me an engine out there as well in case there's any sense. My mom found out the subject mailed two packages, one of which was now in Austin.
I called the FedEx facility in Austin, described the package to the manager, and he said, "Yes, we have that particular box. It's on the dock for outbound delivery."
So at that point, I told the manager that it is alive and provides explosive device, evacuate the building, and then called the bomb squad.
Another package found at the facility. FBI requesting the facility to be evacuated.
"What's going on, boys?"
They're gathering at the front. I get a call on my cell phone from the scene in San Antonio saying, "Hey, get to the FedEx sorting facility. They have one of the packages there that has not detonated."
Line down the highway to get there as soon as we could. They had that package isolated. We immediately sent one of our robots inside and looked at the package, got the tracking numbers off of it, and see that yes, this was, we saw exactly what we thought we would see from the x-ray.
It was the same type of OEE that we assumed had detonated all the other bombs. Our bomber now has placed a device into the FedEx system. There's going to be tracking. There's going to be video of him.
We were able to send a team of agents to the FedEx store where he was shipped, interviewed the store clerk, pulled a video showing the bomber walking in. He was wearing a disguise and his rank gloves.
The employee sent something was wrong, so he followed him to the door and noticed that the bomber had parked three businesses down instead of right from the store.
Everything sped up very quickly at that point because the FedEx employee said he went and got into a red Ford Ranger.
The fact that he walked brazenly into a FedEx facility to drop off those two packages, that was his biggest mistake.
It's hard to underplay how big of a deal this was. This was a blank check type of national incident. The federal government made this a priority for the ATF, surged their national resources, over 600 FBI personnel on scene.
You are racing the clock, and you're trying to prevent another tragedy, and you're trying to make the madness stop.
When you're developing probable cause to identify a suspect, it's usually a bunch of small pieces that fit together, little tick marks, little clues.
We had a truck description from FedEx, but also at the trip wire scene, there was a red sign that was used. We found out from a local vendor that only six of those have been sold in the last 90 days.
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Through an investigation, we determined this was the store that a lot of the bomb-making materials were purchased.
Accident, they provided us a list of different items that they thought might be involved, such as the picture of the gloves that the subject was wearing when he dropped off packages.
We were then able to identify those gloves, come up with a product identification number, and combined with that and the sign is where we were able to generate the one receipt purchased here in Iraq.
We can then look into that transaction on our CCTV, see the subjects or subjects who were purchasing with those items.
We walked into the building. He asked the door greeter some questions. You could tell he was kind of asking where certain items were. Minutes later, he came back with some of the items that we were looking for.
After watching numerous videos, you know, he was wearing his disguise at FedEx. We were pretty certain it was our subject.
We were able to find out when he walked out of the store, followed him across the parking lot, saw what kind of vehicle he went in. It was a bit of a distinctive truck.
There was a way forward. I was able to backtrack, find it when the vehicle pulled in, got a really good shot of it. I was able to provide that information to law enforcement.
All of this information that's developing in real time is being fed back to the command center. Among the dozens of people sitting there is an analyst from the FBI named Giordano.
We finally had a good description. We reviewed a lot of transactional records. I specifically was looking for how the bomber... I went to one of my supervisors and said, "I can't think of anything more simple than running some of this information from the beginning of the bomber case against vehicle registrations and see if any of these people happen to have a red truck."
It's that simple. Her job is to fit the pieces together, and she basically starts making lists.
I was systematically going through each name, and I got to about the seventh name, and it was the bomber's name. I conducted a search to find out what kind of vehicle he had registered to him, if he had one.
It was exactly the vehicle that we were looking for. I located his photo and his identifiers and matched it up with the subject description that we had from the FedEx interview.
It was a heart-stopping moment. There was a full-court press once they knew who he was to capture him because they knew the longer they waited, there was a greater potential that other people could be harmed.
We had undercover officers watching the home that the bomber lived in, as well as other residences that he was connected to. But what we didn't know at that moment was whether or not he was in one of those homes.
What's incredible is the speed with which they went from not knowing anything about this potential bomber to knowing exactly who they think he is, having an address, and thinking about a raid that could neutralize him.
He was paranoid about what was going on, and so he stayed away from the house. He turns off the cell phone around once something in the morning. He wanted to know more information.
That's when he turned the cellphone on, and with different techniques, we were able to locate the area where he was. The FBI is the first to get into the parking lot with Mark Condit, and they have eyes on him.
I thought, "I'm just going through hotels and looking through the hotel parking lots." My first hotel that I went by on the right was the Marriott Courtyard. That's where I found him.
I was in the command post. The surveillance team reported, "We've got him." Immediately, people start getting called, SWAT teams getting ready.
"Hey, do y'all know if FBI was working this area?"
"We can't spook him."
The bomber's car was directly over this hedgerow in this corner. We went around the front of the hotel, turned off our lights.
We noticed then there's exhaust coming out of the car, and it's kind of an "oh crap" moment. It's super quiet out here. If he's in that car and he's awake and he's alert, then he just saw a couple cars back in here and nobody get out of the cars.
We were all in our body armor, prepared for anything. And he don't know, is there anything in the vehicle? Did he wire the vehicle up?
Longer I sat there, you just got this feeling he's finalizing his thoughts. I got an eerie feeling that that wasn't gonna end well.
Back out. Once heat went mobile, the units were already owned in that they were moving in behind him. I backed out, proceeded in behind him as well.
APD SWAT had the two vehicles that were directly behind him, followed him out. He proceeded south on the service road, turned out to go to the frontage road to buy 35.
Right now, the red light stopped him. I don't think that he would have noticed right away, but what happens? He takes an access road one o'clock in the morning, and then he gets a red light at an access road.
We had quite a few people pull up behind him, and if you look at the videotape, you see a pretty long train. At that point, the guy knew the idea was that we needed to hit his van hard enough to try to disable his vehicle.
This was the worst-case scenario. This is not the way they actually wanted to take down the bomber. We were using two regular passenger vans, not ideal at all.
One of our biggest fears is on impact it was going to explode. So I told them, "Whatever you do, you've got to stop him before he gets on the interstate."
The biggest fear was Marc Condit disappearing. What else is he gonna blow up? Based on the randomness of his attacks, the disregard for human life, he didn't care who he hurt or killed.
We had to stop him that night. No matter what happened, we were gonna stop it. We're gonna stop him now.
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All right, made contact with a Fanta. Made contact with... So we exit our van and move up to the vehicle, and he detonates an explosive device inside his vehicle.
Initially, I saw the flash, and I felt shrapnel or debris or whatever hit my face, and I stepped back. I was one of the first up to the windshield area and could see inside.
I quickly recognized that our suspect was no longer a threat at that point. I can't even describe to you how bad it felt listening to the radio traffic there.
I remember distinctly going to a different radio channel to advise dispatch, saying, "I have an officer that's fired shots. We've had an explosion down this Lee."
We had called for a driver's side assault, but because of the way the vehicles ended up with his vehicle in the ditch, that was modified on-the-fly, and we ended up approaching on the passenger side.
I'm really lucky that I didn't lose anybody. If you watch the video of the explosion, the primary amount of pressure came out that driver's side door.
So if I'd had somebody right at that driver's side door, I probably would have lost them. The suspect is deceased.
Breaking news, the suspected serial bomber in Texas is now dead. Forensics teams are still combing through that bomb site.
Yes, there was a moment of relief in that we had at least taken who we believed to be our prime suspect, but we didn't know what he had been doing, whether there were more bombs still in the community somewhere.
The bomber is now dead, but the threat lives on. They don't know if he's been working with accomplices, and they also don't know what's inside that house.
We had discussed that night, the three of us there on the scene, we got to maintain this tempo for at least another three days to make sure there weren't other packages.
We knew that we had to hit that house the next morning. When we got to the house, there was probably about ten FBI SAV T's there with ATF as well.
I actually sat down for a couple minutes and decided to gauge who had had the most sleep versus who had the least, and the guys with the least sleep served more of a support role.
It was the only safe way to do it because we're dealing with a bomber. We don't know what's in the house. That entry was very methodical and careful.
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What's clear is that he was gonna ramp things up, and he had the capability to build much bigger devices. All that stuff was in his house, along with the wig and the gloves and everything that we tied him to.
This investigation was in his bedroom. I mean, he could have placed a bomb under any of our vehicles, but you don't even know the motivation.
It was all random. He didn't know any of the people he was sending them to. What they found in the house was evidence leading them to understand how Mark Condit built these devices.
But what they found in the car was something that might answer why he did this. A phone with a 25-minute manifesto that he'd recorded on it.
That night on that tape, there is no mention of terrorism, hate crime. He says he's a psychopath, and he likes killing people. He purposefully said he has no livers, and that's what continues to elude them.
They still don't have a real motive. Why did he do this?
I'd love to know why, but we're left with what we're left with. And really, the reality is there's no answer, and there's no reason that could ever make any of this okay.
But we're in a position where we just don't know. When our community was at its worst, under attack from a serial murderer, we saw American law enforcement step up and bring it to a quick resolution.
You have three big agencies working on the most high-profile case in the country. Then Austin SWAT, people running up to a bomber's car.
You have bomb techs from the FBI, the ATF, Austin, hundreds of analysts who go through minute pieces of information. This is what law enforcement does. They risk their lives to save people that don't even know to make sure that bombers don't kill any more people.
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You
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