Kriti Mehrotra
CBS’s ‘The FBI Declassified: 20 Days of Terror: The Austin Bomber’ chronicles the tale of the 2018 Austin serial bombings, which occurred between March 2 and March 21, 2018. It highlights how the FBI agents and analysts, along with the Austin Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, worked together to apprehend the suspect, Mark Anthony Conditt, who eventually blew himself up inside his vehicle rather than get caught. In total, during this time frame, there were five explosions, killing two people and injuring five others. This excludes the one Mark used to kill himself. Curious to know the details about the victims? Read on to find out!
Austin Serial Bomber’s Victims: Deaths
On the morning of March 2, 2018, 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House, a finance professor, who was helping his 8-year-old daughter get ready for school, told her to go and brush her teeth before he picked up a package that was left on his front porch. The box exploded, killing him on the spot. That was the first bomb, and the time was 6:55 a.m. His daughter was unharmed. The Austin police initially treated his death as an isolated attack, as there was no evidence that he was the victim of a hate crime or a terrorist attack. They even made a comment on how it could have been possible that Anthony bombed himself, perhaps while assembling the device, which, of course, did not go well with the public and raised questions about racial bias.
The second bomb exploded on the morning of March 12, 2018, at 6:44 a.m., and it too came to a private residence in Austin. This time, though, instead of being in Harris Ridge, it was in East MLK. Left at the Mason’s residence doorstep overnight, not having been delivered via mail, the package holding the device was taken by them into their kitchen. There, Draylen Mason, a 17-year-old promising classical musician who was planning to enroll in the University of Texas’ Butler School of Music in the fall, was killed. His mother, who has not been publicly identified, had opened the package with a knife. But she was only injured as Draylen, who was up and ready, about to head to the gym, shielded her from the impact of the bomb.
Austin Serial Bomber’s Victims: Injuries
On that same day, on March 12, 2018, at 11:50 a.m., another bomb exploded at a private residence in Montopolis, Austin. Delivered to the home of Maria Moreno, it seriously injured her 75-year-old daughter Esperanza Herrera, who was visiting her mother for the day. The strange thing, though, was that there was no real connection in between any of these victims whatsoever, except for the fact that the two previous bombs that fatally killed were delivered to prominent members of the African-American community in Austin.
The fourth bomb, a suspected tripwire-activated bomb, exploded on the evening of March 18, near a road in Travis Country, southwest Austin. It injured two men, a 22-year-old and a 23-year-old, as they were passing by. Unlike the previous explosives, which were left on doorsteps, this one was left at the side of a road, attached to a “Caution: Children at Play” sign. Following this, the Austin Police Department warned the public that a serial bomber was on the loose and that the case was much more dangerous than they initially thought.
The fifth and final bomb injured one person when it exploded shortly after midnight on March 20, 2018, at a FedEx distribution center in Schertz, Texas, near San Antonio. The victim, an employee of the facility, only complained of ringing in the ear after the blast. Later that day, another bomb was discovered, intercepted, and defused at a separate FedEx facility in southeast Austin, near the airport. Both these packages were sent by the same person, Mark Anthony Conditt, from a FedEx store in Sunset Valley. (Featured Image Credit: Austin Community College)
Read More: How Did Mark Anthony Conditt Die?
