Austin police were zeroing-in on a man named Mark Conditt and preparing to arrest him when he committed suicide by detonating a bomb inside his car.
Mark Anthony Conditt, who police say was behind a wave of bombings in Austin and south-central Texas, killed himself early Wednesday in what investigators described as an explosion inside his car, leaving them scrambling to determine whether any bombs remain and if he acted alone.
Conditt detonated a bomb in his vehicle before dawn on the side of Interstate 35 in Round Rock, north of Austin, as police approached him, authorities said.
Conditt appears to have been an Evangelical Right loony.
Conditt was homeschooled as a child and attended Austin Community College from 2010 to 2012, though he didn’t graduate. A series of blog posts he wrote for a U.S. government course at the college provide a glimpse at Conditt’s political views. The Austin-American Statesman reports that Conditt wrote about his opposition to gay marriage and abortion, and his support for the death penalty. He also advocated for the abolishment of sex offender registries.
“Just look at the male and female bodies,” he wrote in one post. “They are obviously designed to couple. The natural design is apparent. It is not natural to couple male with male and female with female. It would be like trying to fit two screws together and to nuts together and then say, ‘See, it’s natural for them to go together.’”
Meet my neighbors; I can hardly go outdoors without tripping over somebody with this educational– and belief-profile, right down to the hare-brained natural law argument against same-sex marriage.
There’s still a lot to learn about Conditt, and he will doubtless yield a more 3-dimensional appearance as a fuller picture develops, but the little bit now available points strongly toward an ordinary, off-the-shelf, far-Right nutjob.