Austin bomb suspect left trail of data

One woman described him as “mostly forgettable.” Another said he seemed like a “normal boy.”

Quiet, homeschooled and pondering a church mission trip just a few years ago, at some point Mark Anthony Conditt “walked away from his faith” and turned into a brazen bomber who put Texas’ capital city on edge for weeks, say those who knew him.

After killing two people and wounding five others over the course of three weeks, the 23-year-old unemployed college dropout died early Wednesday when he blew himself up in a car as police closed in. Within hours, details began to emerge about the unremarkable man behind the chaos.

A computer geek. A tennis player. An opinionated thinker.

For many who knew him, there was nothing that set off any obvious alarms.

Even in his close-knit, religious family, nobody knew of the “darkness” he harbored inside.

“We don’t have any answers,” his grandmother Mary Conditt said Wednesday. “We are just shocked. This is not the Mark I knew.”

By late Wednesday, much of his final day was still shrouded in mystery, as was the motive for his string of fiery violence. As the sun set, police in a news conference revealed the existence of a 25-minute “confession.” But still, they said, it brought them no closer to understanding why.

‘Not a cult’

A longtime Pflugerville resident, Conditt was the oldest of four siblings raised in a “very conservative” family, according to one man who knew them well but did not want to be identified.

The Conditts lived in an old part of the town 20 miles north of Austin. They kept their children out of public schools so they wouldn’t see “the bad stuff in society,” said the man, who worked with Conditt’s father and spent time at their home.

“It was a very ‘us versus them’ type of household,” he said. “I’m guessing that was a catalyst that led Mark to believe what he thought.”

The family held regular gettogethers at their East Pfluger Street home. It was “not a cult,” but may have been mistaken for one, the former co-worker said.

“They were always mentoring us on how to raise our family and how to be good parents to our kids in the society they lived in,” he added. “They were always trying to help people achieve more, as long as it fell in line with what they believed in.”

A longtime neighbor remembered their large religious gatherings every Sunday. Looking back, she said, it was the “only thing that stood out.”

Some neighbors didn’t remember the Conditts’ son, but 75-year-old Jeff Reeb told reporters he was just a “neighborhood kid” from a good family.

“I know that they were church-going people,” he said. “I know that they were extremely good neighbors.”

One woman who home-schooled with Mark Conditt in his early teens said she didn’t see any red flags.

“He seemed like a normal boy,” she said.

No criminal history

Conditt attended Austin Community College as a business administration major at the North Ridge and Round Rock campuses, from 2010 to 2012, apparently while he was still finishing high school.

“He has not attended since that time,” spokeswoman Jessica Vess said, adding that he did not graduate from the college but left in good academic standing with disciplinary problems. “Austin Community College grieves with those impacted by the recent bombings in our community.”

He does not appear to have had any criminal history.

In a blog post Conditt penned in 2012, he wrote that he enjoyed cycling, parkour and reading, describing himself as “not that politically inclined” yet “conservative.”

The blog, for a community college government class, includes links to classmates’ blogs and posts about capital punishment, homosexuality and terrorism.

“Living criminals harm and murder, again — executed ones do not,” one post says, arguing in favor of the death penalty.

In other posts, he decried homosexuality as “not natural” and panned the sex offender registry.

“So you have a guy who committed a crime,” he wrote. “Will putting him on a list make it better? Wouldn’t this only make people shun him, keep him from getting a job, and making friends? Just for a crime that he may have committed over 15 years ago as a adolescent?”

A few months later, in early 2013, his mother Danene posted on Facebook that her son had completed high school and begun thinking about his future.

“I officially graduated Mark from High School on Friday. 1 down, 3 to go,” she wrote. “He has 30 hrs of college credit too, but he’s thinking of taking some time to figure out what he wants to do ... maybe a mission trip. Thanks to everyone for your support over the years.”

Danene could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but a neighbor expressed shock and sympathy.

“I feel sorry for the family — nobody wants something like this to happen,” the neighbor said. “Think about waking up in the morning and finding out this is your son. My heart breaks for the family. What drives somebody to bomb people? The whole thing is very unnerving.”

By the time the bombings began March 2, Conditt had already moved out of his parents’ home, according to those who knew the family.

He and his father bought a home on Second Street in Pflugerville a couple of years ago, according to neighbors there.

One, 57-year-old Mark Roessler, remembered Conditt and his father working together to remodel the home. The father, Roessler said, was excited to have the home project to work on with his son.

Roessler even went inside the home a few times to look at the progress, most recently about nine months ago. Roessler also offered Conditt some old furniture from his home.

“I had encouraged my son to make a connection with him,” Roessler said.

Even though that never panned out, Roessler described Conditt as a quiet guy who kept to himself and would wave at him when doing yard work. He moved into the home about a year ago, Roessler said.

“I am still taking it all in,” he added. “I have a better chance of winning the lottery than living next door to this guy.”

‘Traditional lone wolf’

Former FBI profiler Clinton Van Zandt described Conditt as a “traditional lone wolf offender.”

But Robert Taylor, a criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former police detective, stressed that there’s no such thing as a “typical” suspect, and that criminal profiling isn’t an exact science.

That being said, Conditt fit the profile of a perpetrator in some ways, Taylor said.

Conditt was a white man in his early 20s who attended college and was fairly educated, given the complexity of the bombs he constructed.

That fits the profile of other suspects who have committed similar crimes.

For example, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, attended Harvard University and had a doctoral degree in mathematics. While he was a white male, he was around 35 years old when he started his bombing campaign.

Conditt started his crimes close to home — as many suspects do, because that’s where they feel comfortable — before he moved his boundaries farther and farther.

Taylor said Conditt likely became emboldened after authorities didn’t catch him, so he felt comfortable entering a FedEx store to ship two of the packages — a mistake that helped authorities identify who he was.

“What we see a lot of the time is they are quite intelligent and sophisticated, but they grow arrogant,” Taylor said. “They get arrogant, not reckless. They think they can outsmart them. They think, ‘They don’t have any leads on me. They aren’t going to catch me going into this FedEx store with a disguise on.’”

Making sense of it all

The trail of violence led authorities early Wednesday to a motel on Interstate 35 in the northern suburb of Round Rock.

As tactical teams posted up at the scene, Conditt sped away and stopped in a ditch. When a SWAT team arrived, he set off an explosive inside his car. He died at the scene.

Now, his family — and his community — are struggling to pick up the pieces and make sense of it all.

“I don’t know what happened, what snapped,” his uncle, Mike Courtney, said. “I have no idea.”

Kevin Diaz, Allie Morris, Peggy

Fikac, Emilie Eaton contributed to this report, which contains material from the Associated Press. keri.blakinger@chron.com samantha.ketterer@chron.com alejandra.matos@chron.com