Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - 19 Days | 7. Takedown

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

As authorities close in, bombing suspect Mark Anthony Conditt manages to disappear, once again leaving law enforcement on edge. Soon, however, they track him down to a hotel parking lot just north of Austin, where they begin to carefully plan a tactical takedown. Yet when Conditt realizes law enforcement is everywhere, he decides to run, forcing an intense confrontation. From Campside Media, Pegalo Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Season 6 of Witnessed: 19 Days Unlock all episodes of Witnessed: 19 Days, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed: 19 Days show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts and @campside_media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's a lot of moving parts. It's our protocol, usually you want an ambulance on standby. If we got to hit this house and it's got bombs in it, you know, we would like to have an ambulance there who can treat the wounded. Somehow a message gets garbled, somebody misunderstands, and the EMS didn't know they were supposed to go to staging, and they pull up right in front of the house. So the surveillance guys get on the radio, I was in the command post and they said I don't know what's going on an ambulance just pulled up in front of the

subject's house and we were like oh my god what's going on? And then they're like, hey, they're walking up to the door. They're knocking on the door. We're like, oh my God. Now you got EMS personnel knocking on the door of a bomb factory. Immediately there's a safety concern. The other concern is that's it. They just blew the whole case. So they knock on the door. One of the roommates answers the door and they're like hey did somebody call for EMS at this

location? And they're like I don't know what you're talking about. And the ambulance crew's like we were told to come here. Who needs help? And the room ends up yelling back into the house to the other roommate. We didn't know who, but yells back, hey, did you call for an ambulance? And you know, no, I didn't, I didn't call for an ambulance. So then the EMS is like, all right,

must be a false alarm, you know, sorry. So then they get back in the ambulance and they drive away. So we do a car stop on the ambulance, pull them out and we're like, what the heck just happened? Those two people in the ambulance, they told us a story like, yeah, we talked to this guy, he yelled back to somebody else. So it was a miscommunication. We didn't know is the bomber in the house? Is he not in the house? That's just weird, right? An ambulance comes knocking on your door. The gig is up as far as we're concerned.

So now there's another discussion. Do we need to hit this house right now? But now it's dark. He's already got bombs. He's not going to build seven more in the next couple hours. We're not hitting that thing in the dark Nobody had laid eyes on him. So the decision was hey, even if he knows it's us We're just gonna wait

From Sony Music Entertainment, Campside Media and Peg Pegalo Pictures. This is Witnessed, 19 Days. I'm your host, Sean Flynn. Part 7. Take Down. It's midnight, March 21st, 2018. The brief chaos of a miscommunication with EMS has subsided. Now this army of law enforcement has nothing to do but wait. They identified the Austin bomber as Mark Anthony Condit, but they didn't know where he was. The EMTs who'd gone to the house hadn't seen him.

But he could have been in another room, or somewhere else entirely. The cops were tracking his cell phone, but they weren't picking up any pings, which likely meant Condit had his phone turned off. Maybe he sensed law enforcement was on to him. Maybe not. There were a lot of unknowns at this point. They had some downtime, enough that FBI Special Agent in Charge Chris Combs decided it was a good time to let non-essential personnel get some sleep.

No one had had a lot of that for 19 days. We had aerial surveillance on the house. It was a combination of FBI aircraft and Texas State Police DPS aircraft. So that was beaming into the command post. The decision was, again, for safety and clarity, like, hey, we got to go home and go to bed. Tomorrow's a big day. We're hitting a bomb factory. So all the commanders go back to the hotel. The night shifts got orders. Hey, sit on that place.

If he comes out, take him down. He's not allowed to leave. But we hadn't seen any activity at all. So we actually, we all went home. The day shift, there's still 300 people working. You know, the night shift, but I went back to the hotel. I literally think I got undressed to get into bed and they called.

And said, hey, we got him. He's been spotted. He's in a parking lot of a hotel off of the highway. Once we realized he wasn't at the house and he was like, hey, we got to get him now. He's on the road. We don't know if he has explosives with him. Send all the surveillance assets, get over there, get on top of him.

And then we requested the tactical teams to come in because again, he's a bomb maker We're not gonna have Joe cop or Joe FBI agent try to stop him in a car You need a tactical team. So the order was get those teams over there get on top of him With that order another arm of his law enforcement machine came online. A highly trained precision unit, special weapons and tactics, better known as SWAT. My name is Vince Garcia. I work for the Austin Police Department and I was on the SWAT team. Vincent Garcia was born in San Antonio, graduated high school there

and immediately enlisted in the military. After four years, he returned to Texas, Austin this time, with an eye on joining the police SWAT team, where he thought he could use the skills he learned as a soldier. We do a lot of work for investigative units. Our SWAT team doesn't do the investigative work. We are there solely as a support element for patrol, for investigative units.

If they have an individual that they're looking at, they have to meet a certain criteria for that to come over to the SWAT team. You know, if they have a crazy criminal history, they'll reach out to the SWAT team, and we're there to help facilitate the execution of search forms or arrest forms. When you're on the SWAT team, you have extra training, extra tools, extra people, and they have that extra knowledge of what's going on.

So, I mean, it's still a dangerous environment, but you're able to come in with all that stuff. Swat wasn't called in until the early morning of March 21st, but they'd been on standby for 19 days. At that point, it was just kind of day by day. We were talking about things, but for us on the team, we didn't know what to expect. We were sending representatives to some of the briefings to just get some

information and update us back on the team. And a lot of us worked South by. It's additional overtime for us. So a lot of us worked that, we worked other special events. It was just kind of day by day. Vincent had already had a little bomb scare of his own. He was working one of those overtime shifts a few days earlier when a call came in. A call came out over in an area that I used to patrol

in East Austin and it was a suspicious device attached to a phone line. I walked over there and I just see orange tubes attached to a phone post and there's five or six of them and these wires sticking out of it and it's all duct taped. It looked sketchy as can be. And so a buddy of mine, Rob Nunes, he came on scene. We shut down the intersection, we got everyone evacuated, and I told him, hey, it's right over there, maybe 40 yards or so, 50 yards from me. And he gets out and he's walking in that direction.

I'm just kind of watching him. And I see him looking at it, he kind of peeks around, and there's a car parked along the curb. And then he kind of like gets behind that car. I was like, ooh, shoot. I was he kind of like gets behind that car. I was like, ooh, shoot. I was like, I should probably do this. It ended up actually being nothing.

I guess the phone company, they left some of their equipment out there and it was just sketchy as can be. At that point, a lot of things looked sketchy. Anything out of place, anything with stray wires or shabby packaging, a box or a bag left alone on the sidewalk, a dumpster in an alleyway, anything could have been the next bomb.

But now they had them, the bomber. The command center, the brain of the law enforcement operations in Austin, had just gone silent for the night after all non-essential personnel were told to go home or to their hotels to rest up before the take down the next day. And then, for some reason, Mark Anthony Condit turned on his phone. And when he did, it sent out a signal that gave law enforcement his exact location. Condit was in a small town just north of Austin, Round Rock, and the ping from his cell phone was coming from a courtyard by Marriott, one of a cluster of franchise hotels just off Interstate 35. And all those cops, bomb squads, SWAT, TAC Intel, Austin State, FBI, they were all awake.

Here's Rob Nunez with the Austin Bomb Squad. At that point, myself and a couple of the other bomb techs, we were sent to check another residence. Some different address came up during the investigation they thought needed to be checked. We ran up to Cedar Park to check this address and while we were checking this address some of the electronic surveillance started coming up again and they were actually able to pin down Condon's location to a hotel up in Round Rock. We started to head to that hotel. The SWAT team started coming up with a different assault plan to hold him in position, and we all started to descend and rally up around that hotel.

The main focus at that time is, we can't let this guy get away. Hi, I'm Christy Lee, the creator of Canadian True Crime. Join me for an immersive deep dive into some of the most thought provoking true crime cases in Canada. Using facts curated from court documents, inquiry reports and news archives, I carefully unravel and analyze each case, exposing the pitfalls of the criminal justice system that everyone needs to know about. Find Canadian True Crime wherever you listen to podcasts or visit Canadian True Crime dot CA.

So my first skull is right there on the top shelf. I've had others over the years, but that's my first and my favorite. I'm reporter Ali Jarmaning, host of the new season of WBUR's Last Scene. I'm digging into what happened at Harvard Medical School, how body parts were stolen and sold across the country. In this five-part series, I spend time with those who buy and sell human remains, and I ask, how should we treat the dead? Listen and follow Last Seen wherever you get your podcasts. The first unit to get to the hotel in Round Rock was a surveillance team. Their plan was to search for Condit inside the hotel.

After all, the red Nissan Pathfinder, that's the other car connected to Condit besides the red truck, was parked in the lot. But before they went in, one of them noticed something. Exhaust coming from the tailpipe of the SUV. Here's Rob Nunez again. They had some air assets that were flying around. And they were able to isolate him down to a vehicle that was in the parking lot. By air assets, Rob means the helicopters that were looking for content from above.

At this point, it's all hands on deck. They were able to see the heat signature from the vehicle, and they were able to recognize the vehicle. Now, Condit being in a vehicle presented a number of tactical challenges. First, the vehicle is a means to escape, and if Condit got away, well, that's a worst-case scenario for all involved. Two, once a car is in motion, it can be used as a weapon. It can harm law enforcement and civilians if its operator intends it to. And three, Condit was a serial bomber, so the vehicle also had to be considered an explosive device. He could have bombs with him, or he could have rigged the vehicle itself to explode. And with the engine running, there was no telling how much time they had

before he made a move. Chris Combs from the FBI again. So the surveillance teams have them. There's actually a Texas DPS plane up that's got them on video. DPS is the Texas Department of Public Safety. The order was get teams over there, get on top of him, get ready for SWAT. SWAT's going to

take this down because you need specialty. Vincent Garcia of the SWAT team was one of the few officers still on duty when the signal went up. We were loading our van up and then our intel guys were like, hey, the phone's on. They had pinned them down to that location. So we started heading that way. We put on our SWAT thread, hey, get our armored vehicles and then start heading to that location. SWAT's preferred mode of transportation on calls like this were the Bearcats. Big black armored vehicles that looked like they could withstand a nuclear blast.

The ultimate goal was to get everyone there, hope he stayed there and didn't go mobile. And to get our Bearcats and pin the vehicle in place. Once it's pinned, you can't drive anywhere. The Bearcats are effective, but not exactly low profile. So Vincent and the SWAT team needed to keep their distance. With all sorts of law enforcement descending on the scene, they ran the very real risk of spooking content into running. The plan was we were going to the Rudy's Barbecue.

It's just south of that hotel. We actually parked right behind it. 400 yards away from us was him. We were going to meet up there and we were going to just divvy everyone up. Straight down the middle for the most part, hey, you're going to go with this bearcat, you're going to go with this bearcat, this is the route, and then we're going to pin it, and then we're going to go with this bearcat. You're going to go with this bearcat. This is the route. And then we're going to pin it. And then we're going to call them out.

It's a strange place for this kind of drama, this kind of tragedy to end. All the players, the good guys and the bad guy. They're all in the sterile, generic parking lots of roadside America. It's the same budget hotels you'd see in New Jersey, the same fast, casual restaurants they have in Wichita. All of them separated by wide spreads of blacktop and thin strips of lawn. Here's Josh Oyhus of the Austin Bomb Squad.

We're in the parking lot, and it's all public safety, first responders, and we're all getting together here, getting ready. We were starting to feel like maybe he's in the wind. Maybe he realized because he could have been tipped off potentially. Maybe he's out there gone. Here's Vincent Garcia. We were definitely concerned he could have easily left town, gone anywhere else, continued, or maybe kind of blend in for a little while and then start again at another point.

We were hoping that we could get him into custody. That way, everything he's been doing would be done and we could, you know, kind of get back to some normalcy here. All those cops watching, preparing. And Conda just sat in his car. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. What was he doing?

This is our first time dealing with someone with explosives on the SWAT team. We're going to go take a guy down that's been putting explosives or bombs on people's doorsteps. What if his whole car is full of a bomb or what if, you know, XYZ? So when it came down to it, we were going over the plans and it's really just two plans. We're going to pin it and if that doesn't happen, we're going to do a vehicle assault. In SWAT team parlance, a vehicle assault and subsequent takedown is an attack by SWAT team members on a vehicle a suspect is operating with the intent to disable that vehicle so it can't be used as a weapon and then of course to apprehend the suspect. It's an incredibly risky move that can go wrong in so many ways with potentially catastrophic

consequences to the cops, to the suspect, and to the general public. We have a safety priority. It's citizens and then it's us and then suspect and then evidence. But these are our plans. This is what we need to do to keep the public safe. And so as soon as it was kind of like, Hey, we're gonna vehicle assault them. It was not even a second or two that

someone came on the radio was like, Hey, reverse lights are on. As us and SWAT team are starting to get in position to do a takedown, the air units start to call out, hey, the vehicle's moving. We didn't really have a plan to take down a moving vehicle, so plans are starting to get made as to, hey, what now? Sometimes plans have to be changed, right? So once the vehicle started to move, we start to develop more of a take down contingency for a moving vehicle.

So they have plans to do that and they do those kinds of take downs before, but not really for a bomber. Typically for a bomber, we wanna handle things remotely. We don't wanna be on top of where a bomber, we want to handle things remotely. We don't want to be on top of where a bomber is because we always look at the bomber is the bomb. Four bombings, six devices, two people dead, four injured, and a manhunt unlike any other in American history. It all came down to this.

And they had now, officially officially run out of time. If they were going to catch the Austin bomber it was now or never. That's the sound of fried chicken with a spicy history. Thornton Prince was a ladies' man. To get revenge, his girlfriend hid spices in his fried chicken. He loved it so much, he opened Prince's hot chicken. Hot chicken in the window. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee

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Where's he at? I got him eastbound, wall, lane, coming up to 35 frontage, going to be taking a right turn southbound on 35 for an inch. It's just about 2 a.m. on March 21st, 2018, and the Austin bomber, Mark Anthony Condit, is on the move. Here's Vincent Garcia with the SWAT team. He was coming south through that parking lot. We were coming north through ours.

Vincent's team leader, or TL for the takedown, was Rob Justison, a senior Austin police officer. They were both in a van directly behind Condit when he left the parking lot and made a right onto Frontage Road, which runs parallel to and eventually merges with Interstate 35. Our contingency was, if he goes mobile, then we're going to do a vehicle assault. And we're going to try and do it before he gets on the highway. Because if he gets on the highway, speeds are way too high.

This can be super dangerous, not only for him, but like for us as well. Once he turns onto the frontage road, we give him a lead. And then we pull up behind him, there's a red light. And I feel like that red light took forever. He's red balled, he's stopped right now. It's just an awkward feeling because it's two in the morning, there shouldn't really be anyone behind you or out and about. And again, how much explosive is in his car? Is this whole thing, is this whole car filled up?

Because if it was, that could have taken everyone out. So we're sitting at this red light and I look back through our window, I see a line of headlights coming out of the parking lot. I was like, oh, well, the gig's up for sure. The light turns green. Our other van comes around us and gets in front of the Pathfinder.

We start communicating the radio, hey, let's try and slow it down. We're trying to make it not look like it's suspicious, but at that point, our TL comes on the radio and he's like, hey, let's go ahead and block it. Inside of our vans, the rear seating area, we put some benches in, so we face each other. I'm sitting next to the side doors

and I'm holding onto a strap. And a buddy of mine, he's a breacher. So he's a big boy and just strong. He's sitting at the rear doors and in front of him is our K9 handler and his K9. Ultimately RTL is like, hey, just ram him. We hit him from behind. I think we were going around 45 or so, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're in there and you're not buckled in at all, it doesn't take much.

As soon as we hit him, I flew into my Sergeant. I did not hold onto that grab handle like I thought I would. Arcane and hammer flew forward, the dog flew forward, my buddy Jackman, he was sitting at the back doors, he flew on top of me. And then I heard the side doors open. And then I heard the side doors open. And so at that point I knew someone had gone out. And actually I knew it was Rob because I heard his voice.

Hands up! Hands up! I got Jackman off me, I got up, I started getting out. Jackman off me, I got up, I started getting out. My clear glasses, my protective eyewear, they just flew right off my face. I was like, whatever. As soon as I stepped out, I looked and I saw Rob at the front passenger window. Trying to breach it with his rifle.

Hitting it multiple times, most of the time it'll just shatter, but he ended up having a really dark tent on there. So as breaching it, it's just punching holes into the glass and that tent is holding the rest of the glass together. As I make my way up to the rear passenger window, I go to bring my rifle back so I could go ahead and strike that rear passenger window

and breach that. And as soon as I bring it back, that's when the detonation happened. Just a bright flash. I see glass fly out from the front passenger window and at that moment everything just went silent. When he pulls into the parking lot of this hotel, he ends up given about 25 minutes. It's really a video confession. He did leave a long manifesto and confession of what he did. I have heard it, and it's cut and clear that it was him. He did it, and he was alone.

I remember at one of the parts, he's like, I'm thinking about getting into serial killing or something like that. And it's like, yeah, you're already doing that. That's next time on Witness of Witness 19 Days ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get Binge access to an entire network of other great true crime

and investigative podcasts, all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Witness Show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Witnessed, 19 Days was reported and produced by Eli Korus and Joshua Schaefer of Pegalo Pictures and Alvin Cowan. Executive produced by Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, Ashley Ann Krigbaum, and Matthew Schaer of Campside Media.

Hosted and co-produced by me, Sean Flynn, co-produced by Brian Haas, and co-produced by David Loeffler. Written by Joshua Schaeffer. Edited and assembled by Christie William Schaeffer. Original series theme by Kevin Ignatius of DAS Tapes. Additional music by Bally Yaw. Interviews recorded by Nicholas Sinakis, Eli Kors, and Alvin Cowan.

Sound mix by Craig Placky. Production legal by Sean Fawcett of Raymond Legal PC. And fair use legal by Sarah Burns and Diana Palacios of Davis Wright Tremaine. If you'd like to donate to the Draylen Mason Fellows Program, which helps young up-and-coming musicians in Austin, you can do so by visiting austinsoundwaves.org. Please rate and leave us a review if you like what you've heard, and thanks again for listening.