Nashville Christmas bomber claimed he had cancer before the attack

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The Nashville Christmas bomber claimed to have cancer and appeared to be winding up his affairs before launching Friday’s attack outside an AT&T transmission center, which officials believe aimed to cause destruction rather than to kill.  

Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, was named by the FBI on Sunday as the perpetrator of the Christmas Day bombing, after DNA showed he perished in the attack carried out with an RV rigged to explode.

The explosion took place before downtown streets were bustling with activity and was accompanied by a recorded announcement warning anyone nearby that a bomb would soon detonate. Then, for reasons that may never be known, the audio switched to a recording of Petula Clark’s 1964 hit ‘Downtown’ shortly before the blast. 

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Rausch on Monday said that the bizarre forewarning indicates that Warner did not intend to hurt anyone but himself in the attack, which injured three people and damaged more than 40 buildings.  

‘When you look at all the facts at this point, obviously the audio from the vehicle warning people that an explosion was imminent, the opportunity to clear the area, certainly gives you that insight that the possibility was he had no intention of harming anyone but himself,’ Rausch told Today.  ‘It does appear that the intent was more destruction than death.’ 

A Sunday report from the New York Times details preparations Warner made in the weeks prior to his suicide attack, including telling his ex-girlfriend that he had cancer and giving her his car. 

On December 5, he also told a real estate agent that he worked for as a tech consultant that he planned to retire, according to the newspaper. 

A month before the bombing, Warner gave away the $160,000 home he lived in to a woman in California whose link to him remains unclear, DailyMail.com first reported Saturday.

Warner’s actions leading up to the bombing are now under scrutiny as investigators try to piece together his motive in the unusual attack.

The freelance IT consultant, whom neighbors described as an ‘oddball’, was ‘heavily into conspiracy theories’, a source close to the investigation told DailyMail.com. 

Warner believed 5G cellular technology was killing people, and may have been spurred on in the conspiracy theory by the 2011 death of his father, who worked for telecom BellSouth, which later merged with AT&T.

The bombing badly damaged a critical AT&T transmission center, wreaking havoc on phone communications in multiple states that the company is still racing to resolve. 

Electronic devices seized from Warner’s former home in Antioch, a suburb of Nashville, have been sent to a digital forensics laboratory to unlock his online activity and find out where he discussed his warped views.

‘We are waiting on the digital footprint that should finally provide us with some answers,’ the source explained.

‘The unofficial motive thus far is the suspect believed 5G was the root of all deaths in the region and he’d be hailed a hero.’ 

Agents are also investigating whether Quinn’s paranoia over telecommunications began with the death of his father Charles B. Warner in July 2011, aged 78.

A death certificate obtained by DailyMail.com notes that Charles, nicknamed Popeye, died of dementia after spending his career working for BellSouth, a former AT&T subsidiary which re-merged with the company in 2006.

Officially, the FBI has refused to comment on Warner’s possible motivations. 

‘These answers won’t come quickly and will still require a lot of our team’s efforts,’ FBI Special Agent Doug Korneski said at a Sunday news conference. 

‘Though we may be able to answer some these questions as our investigation continues, none of those answers will be enough by those affected by this event,’ he added. 

TBI Director Rausch echoed Korneski’s comments in his interview on Monday, saying that some aspects of the attack may remain a mystery.  

‘We don’t know for sure that we’ll ever get there to the complete answer because obviously that individual is no longer with us,’ he said.

‘We may never find out the exact reasoning behind the activity that took place.’ 

Over the weekend, new details emerged about Warner’s eccentricities, including the fact that his own mother sued him last year in a property dispute.

According to Davidson County court records, Warner’s 62-year-old brother, Steven Warner, died in September 2018, without leaving a will.

Their mother, Betty Christine Lane, who divorced father Charles B. ‘Popeye’ Warner years before his 2011 death, argued that the former family home, which had passed from Charles to Steven, should then legally belong to her – but Anthony Warner seized it using power of attorney.

But Lane says in her lawsuit that Anthony, acting as ‘attorney-in-fact’ fraudulently claimed the $250,000 home for himself in an August 2018 quitclaim deed transfer. 

Lifelong bachelor Anthony then mysteriously gave the home to a 29-year-old, Los Angeles-based woman named Michelle Swing, whose ties to him are unclear.

The mother-son suit appeared to have been resolved by November of this year, however, after Swing used the same transfer process to give the three-bed, single story property back to Lane, who is still residing there today.

When DailyMail.com asked the 85-year-old Lane on Sunday about her son Anthony Warner she said she could ‘not talk about it’.

The retiree also posted signs in her yard warning she would call the cops if anyone trespassed on her driveway.

On Sunday afternoon, Lane was being comforted by her 59-year-old daughter Teresa Wardrop, who told DailyMail.com: ‘We are not going to speak to you.’ 

Swing is also the woman to whom Anthony deeded his primary residence on November 25 of this year.

When DailyMail.com reached out to Swing on Sunday to confirm details of what happened in the earlier property dispute she declined to answer. 

Swing also failed to respond to questions over what sort of relationship, if any, she or her family had ever had with Anthony Warner.

DailyMail.com revealed Saturday that Anthony Warner also passed on his primary residence to Swing for free, just a month before launching his bomb plot in downtown Nashville.

Swing, who has family in Knoxville and studied business and marketing at the University of Tennessee, told us she knew nothing about the acquisition despite being involved in the earlier property transfer.

Bizarrely, her cell phone number is scribbled on a note currently pinned to the back door of the neatly-kept duplex, a 15-minute drive south of central Nashville.

Warner was a retired burglar alarm installer who continued to work as a freelance IT consultant. 

Neighbors described him as an eccentric loner who was often spotted tinkering with unusual antennas outside of his home in Antioch, a Nashville suburb.

The home on Bakertown Road is festooned with security cameras, spotlights, and ‘no trespassing’ signs, as well as odd antennas. 

Several neighbors have described Warner as an ‘oddball’ and said they’d seen an RV parked outside the home which matched the one used in the attack. 

The RV had been outside of Warner’s home since at least the spring of 2019, images from Google Street View show. 

Three were injured in the massive explosion early on Christmas Day, after the RV played a warning to evacuate minutes before the explosion.

In a bizarre twist, the RV’s loudspeakers then blasted Petula Clark’s 1964 soul hit ‘Downtown’ immediately before the bomb went off.

The attack devastated the heart of Nashville’s tourist scene, a downtown strip packed with honky-tonks and bars. 

Authorities said Warner was not known to law enforcement before the Christmas blast.   

Anthony Warner told LA mother, 29, he planned to spend Christmas ‘in the woods with his dogs’ and warned her basement of home he gave her for free was ‘not normal’   

Michelle Swing, the woman to whom Warner gifted his $160,000 house in November, insisted to DailyMail.com on Saturday that she had no knowledge of the transfer. 

She pointed out that her signature did not appear on the quitclaim deed, saying: ‘In the state of Tennessee you can deed property to someone else without their consent or their signature or anything. 

‘I didn’t even buy the house he just deeded it over to me without my knowledge. 

‘This all very weird to me, that’s about all I can say.’ 

But a new report claims that Warner informed Swing of the transfer in a strange letter last month.

‘The attic has plywood and lighting, take a look. The basement is not normal, take a look,’ Warner allegedly wrote in the letter described by The Sun. 

He concluded with the words: ‘Woof woof Julio.’ 

In the letter Warner also shared that he ‘intended to travel on Christmas Eve to spend a few weeks in the woods with his dogs’. 

Speaking to DailyMail.com, Swing declined to disclose whether she had ever met Warner or if she had any family links to him, saying: ‘I’ve been told to direct everything else to FBI.’

The Sun reported that police believe Warner may have had a relationship with Swing’s mother. 

The outlet said Swing told investigators that she last spoke to Warner a week before Thanksgiving and that she had never met him in person.    

Records show Warner also transferred another home on Bakertown Road to Swing via a quitclaim deed in January 2019. 

The $250,000 house had previously belonged to Warner’s brother Steven, and Warner had only been in possession of it for five months before giving it to Swing for free. She later also used a quitclaim to give the house to Warner’s mother, Lane.  

Swing’s address in the record for the transfer is listed as Lenoir City, Tennessee, a two-hour drive from Nashville.  

According to her LinkedIn profile, she studied Marketing and Business and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she remained working until 2012 when she moved to California. 

Swing first lived in San Francisco before a move to Los Angeles in October 2018, where she works in artist development for Anschutz Entertainment Group.  

‘An oddball who had a paranoia about 5G’: Anthony Warner’d neighbors say they saw him tinkering with the antenna on his roof and putting up ‘No Trepassing’ signs around his property

Neighbors of Anthony Warner’s home in Antioch described him as an ‘oddball’ as they reacted to the stunning news that he was considered a person of interest in the Nashville Christmas Day bombing.   

Several neighbors had reported seeing the RV used in the explosion parked outside of Warner’s home on Bakertown Road.

Tony Rodriguez, who lives within the duplex that agents raided on Saturday, told the Washington Post that he never spoke to his neighbor, 63, and did not know his name.

He alleged that Warner, who is said to be unmarried and without children, kept ‘No Trespassing’ signs around the home, especially around the RV, and was often seen tinkering with antenna above the house.

Rodriguez also claimed that investigators had taken a computer motherboard from Warner’s house during the search.

Another neighbor Steven Stone, 61, confirmed that he had seen a similar RV parked outside of Warner’s place.

‘When I looked out my window and saw all the law enforcement that’s when it hit me that I’d see the camper up there,’ he told USA Today. 

According to News4, a Nashville real estate agent contacted FBI agents after fearing the subcontractor who worked for him was who they were searching for in connection to the blast outside the AT&T transmission center.

Realtor Steve Fridrich said a man who went by Tony Warner had done IT work for him as a subcontractor.

‘Nice guy. You know, he was a techie guy – don’t mean anything negative about that. He would do this thing and leave. He didn’t bother anybody. He did his thing and leave [sic],’ Fridrich said. 

Fridrich said he was asked by agents whether Warner had paranoia about 5G technology. He told agents they had never spoken about that.  

A source close to the federal investigation told News4 that agents were probing whether Warner had paranoia that 5G technology was being used to spy on Americans.   

In a different interview with the Tennessean, Fridrich said Warner ‘seemed very personable to us – this is quite out of character I think’. 

‘In December he sent us an email saying he’d no longer be working for us,’ Fridrich added.  

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation released Warner’s arrest record on Monday, revealing that he was charged with ‘marijuana possession for resale’ in January 1978. The Daily Beast had previously reported that Warner was convicted of an unspecified felony charge in 1980.  

State records showed that Warner used his Bakertown Road address as the location of a custom alarm business which specialized in burglar alarms.

The alarm fitting license for the business, Custom Alarms Electronics, expired in 1998.  

‘I’ve never grabbed somebody so hard in my life’: Hero cops who evacuated residents minutes before explosion describe their terror as FBI probes whether bomber targeted police

Friday’s blast emanated from a white RV parked outside the AT&T building on 2nd Avenue at 6.40 am. The explosion injured three people and caused severe damage to the city’s downtown area. 

Cops had been called to the area around 6am following reports of shots fired. 

They arrived to find no evidence of a shooting but instead encountered the RV, which was playing a recording of a woman’s voice warning that it would explode in 15 minutes. Suddenly the warning stopped, and ‘Downtown’ started playing.

Six responding officers who rushed to evacuate the area have been hailed as heroes for their quick efforts in the face of grave danger. They are: Officers Brenna Hosey, James Luellen, Michael Sipos, Amanda Topping, James Wells and Sergeant Timothy Miller. 

Five of the officers described their version of events at a press conference on Sunday morning.

Officer Luellen said he arrived at the scene first and scoped out the building where gunshots were reported, finding now evidence of gunfire. 

Hosey arrived soon after, at which point both officers heard the recording coming from the vehicle.  

‘There’s a large bomb within this vehicle, your primary objective is to evacuate,’ Luellen quoted a woman’s voice as saying.  

‘I looked at Officer Hosey just to verify we heard the same thing, and then it started over,’ he said. 

Luellen said he reported the audio to his supervisor, Sgt Miller, who ordered the deployment of all available units and instructed officers to evacuate the area. 

Minutes later the RV started playing a three-minute countdown, followed by ‘Downtown’, Luellen said. He said all the shades were down on the vehicle, which didn’t have a tag.  

Then came the explosion, which knocked Luellen to the ground before he ran over to check on another officer who was sitting in a squad car and became trapped when its airbag activated in the blast.  

Officer Wells described hearing a voice from God which told him to check on his partner Topping seconds before the blast went off, throwing him backward. 

Topping said she sprinted to Wells and the pair ran for cover in a doorway. 

‘I’ve never grabbed somebody so hard in my life,’ Topping said, her voice shaking with emotion. 

Wells said that EMTs tried to take him to the hospital for examination, but he convinced them to let him go and focus their efforts on the three reported injuries. He said he couldn’t imagine leaving his fellow officers behind after such a terrifying ordeal. 

‘This is going to tie us together forever, for the rest of my life,’ Wells, who suffered some hearing loss due to the explosion, told reporters at the news conference. ‘Christmas will never be the same.’

Officer Hosey said she and her colleagues knocked on six or seven doors in nearby apartments to warn people to evacuate. She particularly remembered a startled mother of four children.

‘I don’t have kids but I have cousins and nieces, people who I love who are small,’ Hosey said, adding she had to plead with the family to leave the building as quickly as possible. 

Each of the officers described how they called loved ones to assure that they were okay before news of the explosion reached the media.    

The FBI is said to be investigating whether the blast was deliberately designed to target law enforcement officers.  

One expert theorized that the spooky recording was designed to bring as many cops and first responders as possible into the area with the intention of killing or maiming them.  

‘I kind of think it was probably an idea to get first responders to come in,’ ex-NYPD Detective Bill Ryan told Fox News on Saturday.