At 1:22 in the morning on Christmas Day 2020, a man named Anthony Quinn Warner parked a recreational vehicle at 166 Second Avenue North, outside an AT&T switching facility. Then he waited.
At around 5:30 a.m., people in the area reported gunshots. Two Metro Nashville police officers — James Wells and Brenna Hosey — arrived and found no shooter, but they found the RV. A computerized female voice was broadcasting from its speakers: “All buildings in this area must be evacuated now. If you can hear this message, evacuate now.”
Then: “This vehicle will explode in fifteen minutes.”
Six officers went door to door, rousing people from their beds on Christmas morning, pulling them out of buildings along 2nd Avenue. They didn’t know what was in the RV. They didn’t know when it would go off. They didn’t leave.
At some point during the countdown, the speakers switched to Petula Clark’s 1964 hit “Downtown.” The song was still playing when the bomb detonated at 6:30 a.m.
The blast damaged at least 41 businesses and was felt miles away. One building across the street collapsed entirely. The AT&T facility was gutted, knocking out phone service, internet, and 911 systems across Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama. Flights were grounded at Nashville International. Credit card terminals went dark across the region.
Warner, 63, was the only person killed — a suicide. Eight people were injured, none critically. The six officers who ran toward a bomb on Christmas morning are the reason nobody else died.
The FBI concluded Warner acted alone, driven by paranoia, conspiracy theories, and what investigators later described as a desire to “break the reincarnation loop.” His girlfriend had told police a year earlier that he was building bombs in the RV. They checked, found nothing visible from the outside, and closed the case.
In the weeks before the bombing, Warner quit his job, gave away his car, and signed his house over to a stranger for zero dollars. A neighbor said he’d told her: “Nashville and the world is never going to forget me.”
The thing is, Nashville mostly has. Not the event — that’s remembered. But Warner himself has faded into the background of the story, which is exactly the opposite of what he wanted and exactly what Nashville does best. The city remembers the officers. It remembers the block. It remembers that 2020 had already given Nashville a tornado in March and a pandemic, and that somehow this was the thing that happened on Christmas.
Second Avenue reopened to vehicle traffic on December 22, 2025 — three days before the fifth anniversary. The rebuild took five years. Some businesses never came back. The ones that did don’t talk about it much.
The Petula Clark detail is the one that stays with people. A song called “Downtown” playing on a bomb in downtown Nashville. Nobody knows if Warner meant it as a joke or a statement or nothing at all. It doesn’t matter. It’s the kind of detail that makes a moment stick — the absurd cruelty of a cheerful song counting down to an explosion on Christmas morning, while six cops banged on doors.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons