Nashville police were warned in 2019 that Anthony Warner was making a bomb inside his RV, but nothing was done to stop it.
Warner’s girlfriend told Nashville police on Aug. 21, 2019, that she “was building bombs on the RV trailer at her residence,” according to a report published Tuesday in The Tennessean.
City police tipped the FBI and ATF.
But when authorities showed up at Warren’s door no one responded and a subsequent request to search the property was denied, The Tennessean reported.
Warner’s bombing continued unhindered until Christmas morning, when it detonated explosives in the vehicle and leveled a stretch of downtown Nashville.
Records reviewed by the newspaper show that Raymond Throckmorton, a woman’s lawyer, initially called police and said his unnamed friend Warner was worried about the comments he had made, and that he did not want two guns that he said they belonged to Warner in their home.
Throckmorton told police Warner “often talks about the military and making bombs” and “knows what he does and is capable of making a bomb,” records said.
Police saw the RV on Warren Road, but it was closed and did not enter.
“They saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter his home or locked property,” Nashville Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Don Aaron said in a statement to the newspaper.
Nashville PD forwarded the information to the feds, but “the FBI reported that they checked their funds and found no records at Warner,” Aaron said.
On August 28, 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense also reported that “Warner’s controls were negative,” Aaron told The Tennessean.
“At no time was any evidence of a crime detected and no further action was taken,” the spokesman said. “No additional information about Warner came to the attention of the department or the FBI after August 2019.”
Warner, 63, appeared on radar around 6:30 a.m. Christmas morning when he fired a bomb that killed him, injured three others and damaged 41 buildings.
The blast, outside an AT&T facility, disrupted communication systems through parts of the southeast.