Veteran Profiler Provides Insight into Austin Bomber's Motives, Personality

We may never know the Austin bomber's motive, but experts say it should not be difficult to figure out why the 23 year old did what he did, Newsradio 1200 WOAI reports.

"Somebody his age and his lack of experience, and the technology and people around him, they're going to be able to put motive together," retired FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt says.

The agent who is credited with helping identify Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber says times are different. People these days live their lives online, especially those in their 20s.

Mark Conditt, 23, blew himself up before police could question him. He is believed to have manufactured three bombs that exploded across Austin's east side, one that targeted a southwest side neighborhood and at least two more that were shipped via FedEx.  Two people were killed and five injured.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a conference call with media that investigators used cell phone traffic to help identify him.  “His phone number was a person of interest” before he showed up at the FedEx facility, Abbott said.

Van Zandt says that would have given the feds an easy lead.

"They could say, okay, we've got five different sites. Let’s see what cell phone pinged at all five sites?"

Early in the investigation, it was speculated that the Austin bomber must be former military.  That turned out to be untrue.  Conditt grew up with two parents and three siblings in Pflugerville.  He was homeschooled and took some college credits at Austin Community College.  A business networking site shows he worked at Crux Semiconductor as a “purchasing Agent/buyer/shipping and receiving."

"He may not be that complicated an individual," Van Zandt explains.  "Unfortunately, you can go on the internet and find how to build devices like the ones he had."

On a blog Conditt wrote as part of a college class, at age 17, he described himself as a conservative. He wrote that he was against gay marriage and abortion and in favor of the death penalty. He also wrote that he supported doing away with the sex offender registration system.

"So you have a guy who committed a crime. Will putting him on a (sex offender) 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," he wrote.  "On a side note, one fifth of all rapes are committed by a juvenile."

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