Anthony Quinn Warner Nashville Christmas bomber had cancer, was sued by his mother & started giving away possessions before blast.
The Nashville Christmas bomber claimed to have cancer and may have been winding up his affairs leading into Friday’s attack outside an AT&T building in the city, according to a new report.
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.
In the weeks prior to the suicide attack, which injured three and caused massive damage, Warner told his ex-girlfriend that he had cancer and gave her his car, according to the New York Times.
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 also gave away the $160,000 home he lived in to a woman in California whose link to him remains unclear.
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Oddball heavily into conspiracy theories
Warner’s actions leading up to the bombing are now under scrutiny as investigators try to piece together his motive.
The freelance IT consultant, whom neighbors described as an ‘oddball’, was ‘heavily into conspiracy theories’, a source close to the investigation told the dailymail.
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 seeking 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 views.
‘We are waiting on the digital footprint that should finally provide us with some answers,’ the source told the dailymail.
‘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.’
Father’s dementia death may have inspired retribution
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 the dailymail 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.
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.
Mother son lawsuit
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, 85, 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.
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.
