Nashville bombing: Girlfriend told police in 2019 bomber was building explosives in an RV, records show

On August 21, 2019, police received a call from an attorney representing Pamela Perry, the woman who said she was the girlfriend of the bomber Anthony Warner, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said Tuesday. Her attorney, Raymond Throckmorton, said she had made “suicidal threats to him via telephone.”

CNN has reached out to Throckmorton for comment about his account — first reported by the Tennessean — but has not yet heard back.

An officer observed Warner’s home for several days, but found no evidence of bomb making, according to Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake. It would have required a sign of a crime being committed, or that a bomb was being made, to obtain a legal search warrant or subpoena, Drake said.

“I believe officers did everything they could legally. Maybe we could have followed up more — hindsight is 2020,” Drake said. “The officers did not have probable cause to get a search warrant. There was a call for service on a lady who had two guns, who needed care, and so we, you know, she needed some assistance. There was nothing else there to say OK, yeah — you have to have probable cause.”

After their visit to Perry’s home, police went to Warner’s property, but Warner would not open the door for them, a statement from the department said.

Days left of sifting through the crime scene

The explosion Friday outside an AT&T transmission building in Nashville damaged more than 40 buildings and injured at least eight people.

Warner’s remains were found at the scene. Investigators positively identified him by comparing DNA from the scene to that on gloves and a hat from a vehicle he owned, Rausch said. The motive for the explosion is still unknown.

The blast left the historic Nashville street in disarray, and federal investigators expect it will take until Friday to sift through the rubble and collect all of the evidence from the crime scene, officials said Tuesday.

At the time, national response teams from the FBI and ATF had finished going through half of the crime scene and opened it up to city workers for cleanup and safety assessment, FBI spokesman Jason Pack said.

And though authorities have a lot of work ahead of them in determining what motivated the destruction, the area began to be opened up to nearly two dozen business owners and residents on the outskirts of the impact site.

They were escorted by officials into buildings deemed structurally safe to retrieve their important items — in some cases their pets.

“This year’s been tough,” Pete Gibson, the owner of Pride & Glory Tattoo on 2nd Avenue, told CNN. “But right when we get a little light at the end of the tunnel, it all goes away in two seconds.”