James Jeffrey
A lighter side of Austin. Most residents appear shocked that such events as the string of bombings could happen in a place as laid-back as Austin, but as the city keeps growing, some say, it exhibits more of the attitudes that go with a bigger, brasher metropolis.
The death of the primary suspect in five bombings that killed two people and injured four others in Austin put an end to three weeks of uncertainty for residents of the Texas capital. But questions about the investigation of the crime, and the safety of people of color living in a well-known progressive haven, continue to surface.
Since March 2, three parcel bombs and a trip-wire device exploded. Then, early on the morning of March 20, a fifth device exploded at a FedEx facility in the city of San Antonio. The package containing it had been en route to Austin.
Amid rising public concern, the FedEx blast offered police a crucial breakthrough: surveillance video of a man in a blonde wig and gloves delivering a package to the facility on March 19. Police soon located twenty-three-year-old Mark Conditt at a motel north of Austin. As a SWAT team closed in on him in the early morning hours of March 21, Conditt killed himself by detonating a powerful bomb in his car.
This brought an end to a manhunt that involved hundreds of personnel including police, FBI agents, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, and bomb technicians. But the city is still grappling with widespread public outcry and anxiety over what some say is a failure of law enforcement and a lack of media coverage of attacks directed at people of color.
The city is grappling with anxiety over what some say is a failure of law enforcement and a lack of media coverage of attacks directed at people of color.
Before the trip-wire device in southwest Austin that injured two white men, the first three bombs targeted African American households in the city’s less affluent east side, historically home to predominantly black and Latino residents.
Austin has a long-checkered past of racial tension and inequity, despite priding itself on its progressivism. In 1928, city planners encouraged racial segregation with the creation of a “Negro District”—today subsumed in Austin’s east side—a policy later compounded by denying services to residents based on race. The city also has some of the highest rates of income segregation in the country, and is one of the few American cities where the African American population is shrinking.
After the first bomb, which detonated March 2, killing thirty-nine-year-old Anthony House in northeast Austin, some began to question whether the Austin Police Department would have more readily sounded the alarm if the victim had been white. Initially, the police suggested the first bomb might have been a self-inflicted accidental death, for which interim Austin Police Chief Brian Manley later apologized. He also highlighted the challenges in establishing the work of a serial attacker until the next attack occurred.
“At first it did cross my mind that maybe they weren’t taking it seriously,” says Kevin Shaw, a fifty-three-year-old black Austin resident whose family has lived since 1957 in the same east side neighborhood where the second bomb went off on March 12. “But the police were new to this sort of situation. It’s never happened in Austin before, and so didn’t know how to operate at first. But they took it very seriously. They’ve been doing a good job, especially as they had so little to go on.”
Across social media, especially, a narrative formed that the Austin bombings were another example that media does not cover tragedies in communities of color with the same determination as disasters affecting white communities.
James Jeffrey
View of the capitol from east Austin.
“When does a story pick up stream and why—is it simply because of the volume or because the problem left East Austin,” says Kevin Foster, a professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin, and who is involved in community programs on the east side. “I don’t know the answer, but we need to ask the question. This community is used to institutional neglect and being marginalised.”
One of the reasons the Austin bombings didn’t draw such round-the-clock national coverage as, say, Hurricane Harvey, is that the investigation released very little information needed to sustain readers’s attention. Given these circumstances, some have praised local media including the Austin-American Statesman and Texas Tribune for their rigorous reporting on the story.
Nevertheless, thanks to social media, complaints about the coverage garnered momentum.
The story may even have been picked up by Russian bots. NPR’s national security editor Philip Ewing noted that some of the Twitter activity related to the Austin bombings “appears initially to be connected with the Russian social media agitation” that’s emerged since the 2016 presidential election. Such activity has been linked with stoking reactions to the likes of the Charlottesville protests and NFL players kneeling during the national anthem—pushing social media debate on divisive issues to undermine American stability.
Among the wreckage of the suspect’s car was a cell phone containing a twenty-five-minute video confession in which Conditt spoke about the challenges in his life, though he didn’t explain his choice of targets or allude to any ideology, according to Police Chief Manley.
"We're never going to be able to put a [rationale] behind these acts," Manley said in a statement. “It is the outcry of a very challenged young man.”
That comment has stirred debate about whether the same level of compassion would have been shown if the attacker had been a person of color or a Muslim.
Others wonder about the wider context in which the bombings happened.
“I am not that surprised [about the bombings] with the way modern society is going with the hate fomented by politicians,” says sixty-eight-year-old Don Rypka, outside the flagship Whole Foods Market in downtown Austin. Rypka moved to the city a year ago after thirty years in Argentina. “Over there, the violence was very one-on-one, but in America it is indiscriminate.”
Most Austin residents appeared more shocked that such events could happen in a city as laid-back as Austin, famed as a liberal oasis in a very red state. But as Austin keeps growing, some say, it exhibits more of the attitudes that go with a bigger, brasher city compared to the laid-back hippy ways of older, smaller Austin.
“Friends were emailing me after they heard about the bombings, but I felt almost an outlier as I told them I wasn’t that worried,” says Austin resident Chandra, forty-eight. “Because I walk a lot, I often already feel I am taking my life into my hands as people are so bad to pedestrians.”
Both police and media attention have now turned to unravelling why Conditt did what he did. And discussions are emerging around what the experience means for people of color living here.
“It makes me think of the Bible’s saying that we live in perilous times,” says John Doyle, fifty-seven, a black retired firefighter, as he leaves a supermarket on Austin’s east side. “Look at what we are doing to each other.”
James Jeffrey is a British journalist who divides his time between America, East Africa, and the UK. His writing appears in various international media.