Austin bomber Mark Conditt left behind a 25-minute video confession recorded on his phone, which authorities found with him after he killed himself with an explosive device early Wednesday, reports the Austin American-Statesman. The discovery of the confession comes after a series of bombings over three weeks that killed two, injured five and created fear through the city.
Interim Police Chief Brian Manley said the recording – which officials believe was made between 9 and 11 p.m. Tuesday night as authorities closed in on Conditt – describes in detail the differences between each of the seven explosive devices authorities say Conditt built, including one found intact at a FedEx facility Tuesday and the final one that took his life early Wednesday.
Manley said there appeared to be no specific reasons why Conditt targeted the people who were killed or injured in the attacks. The recording, which officials won’t release while the investigation is underway, does not clearly illustrate a motive for the bombings or explain how he chose his victims.
“He does not at all mention anything about terrorism nor does he mention anything about hate,” Manley said, “but instead, it is the outcry of a very challenged young man, talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point.”
Before the confrontation with Conditt, authorities had been looking for a “peaceful resolution, Manley said. Police located him in a motel parking lot, but as they waited for tactical teams, he drive out of the lot.
“Not knowing where he was going to go or what might be next or whether he was armed, there was a decision made to put the stop in that frontage road before he got on I-35 and potentially went anywhere else,” Manley said.
Even as it became clear that Conditt exploited modern fondness for online shopping to invoke terror, law enforcement, too, used emerging social dynamics, including Americans’ growing comfort with surveillance cameras, to protect the public, the Christian Science Monitor reports.
“This case shows the depths to which law enforcement has to go to meet the challenges of the time,” says former FBI assistant director Joe Lewis. “That they identified the individual as quickly as they did and maintained a low loss of life, that is truly good police work.” While the ordeal seemed to unravel in slow motion, authorities closed the case in the same time frame as the D.C. sniper was caught in 2002.
Authorities were able to recover the battery from one bomb, which narrowed their search: It was one of only a few that had come into the U.S. from overseas. The discovery of a second, unexploded package and security video of the bomber, in a blond wig, dropping off packages for delivery, led to Conditt’s identification.
This kind of digital forensics has become an increasingly valuable tool for law enforcement as investigators have become more familiar with tracking technology and the sheer availability of data has increased, says Don Vilfer, former head of the White Collar Crime and Computer Crime Unit of the FBI in Sacramento.
“We leave digital trails as we travel throughout the day with so much that we do,” he says. The number of surveillance cameras in the U.S. doubled from 33 million in 2012 to nearly 62 million by the end of 2016. Privacy concerns have not gone away, but have been muted as digital footage has proved invaluable in solving terrorist attacks on civilians.