Over the last three weeks, Austin has been terrorized by a series of package bombings throughout the city. 24-year-old white male Mark Anthony Conditt was identified as the bomber, when on Wednesday, March 21, he was killed due to an explosion detonated in his own car after driving his SUV into a ditch just as police officers were closing in on him.

Five explosions occurred over a three-week span starting on March 2 and continuing all the way until March 21, sending the citizens of Austin and surrounding areas into a constant state of panic and fear. The first two bombings involved cardboard packages left in front of houses overnight. These packages weren’t delivered by any official delivery service such as UPS or FedEx, APD has said.

The first blast on March 2 killed 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House, when he opened a package, detonating the explosive and in turn resulting in his death. On March 12, the second and third bombings occurred, when a mother opened the package in her kitchen, critically injuring herself and killing her 17-year-old son. Later that day, a 75-year-old woman was seriously injured when she opened a similar cardboard package, only miles away from the attack earlier that day. Residents of Austin expressed concern that the attacks might be racially motivated because the first three explosions that occurred had all been African American or Hispanic victims.

The fourth blast occurred on March 18, where instead of leaving the packages at someone’s house, the suspect left the device on the side of a residential road and was triggered by a tripwire bomb, showing the suspect had “a higher level of sophistication, a higher level of skill,” according to interim Austin police chief, Brian Manley. Unlike the three previous attacks, the victims of this explosion were two white males.

Another device exploded early morning on March 20 at a FedEx ground distribution facility in Schertz, Texas just outside of Austin where the bombings were occuring, injuring one person. Finally, the last package bomb was found in a mail facility near the Austin-Bergstrom Airport, and thankfully did not detonate. Throughout these few weeks, police had been consistently warning residents to be wary of unexpected or suspicious packages.

The Austin Police Department (APD) secured surveillance footage from a FedEx store south of Austin, which showed a man in a baseball cap, a blonde wig and pink gloves, bringing two packages into the store. Authorities had also concluded that the bombs were made out of common household items found in hardware stores, therefore they went through receipts at areas surrounding the FedEx store and eventually started fitting the pieces together. From there, the police used cell phone triangulation technology to finally finding him on March 21 in a hotel north of Austin, in Round Rock, where the chase to catch him began and soon later ended when he detonated a bomb inside of his car while surrounded by SWAT teams.

People began to wonder what Condit’s background was like before the bombings,  therefore leading to an in-depth investigation. Conditt grew up in the town of Pflugerville, located about 20 miles north of Austin, in a devout Christian family and was described as a socially awkward introvert among his family members. Additionally, Conditt was homeschooled, did not have any criminal record, and was attending classes at Austin Community College (ACC). Friends, families, and acquaintances of Conditt were confused as to why Conditt carried out these attacks, since he had never shown any violent tendencies before the explosions. To his classmates in his political science class at ACC, he wasn’t overly opinionated yet still like debating issues, and seemed “normal”. Additionally, one of Conditt’s former friends, Jeremiah Jensen described Conditt as smart, shy and thoughtful, as well as saying that he always thought he was going to bloom into a productive person and that Conditt had never exhibited tendencies that made him think he’d be “capable of something like this.” In Jensen’s interview to NPR, he states, “He’s not a psychopath,” Jensen continues, “something broke him.”

Conditt additionally left a 25 minute confession cell phone recording (which is currently not released to the public), where he states “I wish I were sorry but I am not.”, as well consistently describing himself as a “psychopath”, but never mentions anything about terrorism or hatred toward anything, and gave no hint about why he chose the targets of these attacks.