All Is Not Calm - The Nashville Christmas Day Bombing
Share
Subscribe
On Christmas morning 2020, an RV parked on Second Avenue in downtown Nashville began telling an empty street that there was a bomb inside it. Six Metro police officers walked toward it anyway. Sixteen months earlier, a woman had told police exactly what was in that vehicle — and nobody could do a thing about it.
This is the Nashville Christmas Day bombing: the fifteen-minute countdown, the officers who evacuated a city block in their own voices, the communications collapse that took 911 service down across four states, and the warning that came too early to matter.
Plus the answer the FBI did not make public until five years later — what Anthony Warner actually believed, and why he thought it had to be a bomb.
December 25, 2020. At 1:22 in the morning, a white RV parks in front of 166 Second Avenue North — the AT&T building on Nashville’s oldest street. Just after 5:30 a.m., a recorded voice begins warning anyone who can hear it to evacuate. At 6:14 it starts counting down from fifteen minutes. At 6:29 it detonates.
No one is killed but the man who built it. Sixty-five buildings are damaged. Phone, internet and 911 service fail across Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia. Roughly 100 emergency call centers in 46 Tennessee counties are affected. Hospitals lose access to records. Flights are grounded.
We walk the morning on the clock, with Officers Tyler Luellen, Brenna Hosey, Michael Sipos, Amanda Topping and James Wells telling it in their own voices from the December 27, 2020 press conference. Three of the six officers on that street had been police officers for less than two years.
Then the part of the story that happened sixteen months earlier — an August 2019 call to Metro dispatch, an attorney who said he believed the bomb claim more than the crisis claim, two officers who knocked on a door on Bakertown Road, and a question this case never answers: what do you do about a man who has broken no law?
And finally, the why. The FBI closed the case in March 2021 calling it an intentional act to end his own life, driven by paranoia and conspiracy beliefs. But the fuller answer did not become public until December 2025, when the agent who led the investigation spoke on the record for the first time.
WITH THANKS
The Metro Nashville Police Department, and the department’s Office of Public Affairs, for the body camera footage and the audio of the December 27, 2020 press conference. The officers’ own account of that morning is the spine of this episode and it exists because MNPD released it.
Jeremy Finley and WSMV4 News in Nashville. Mr. Finley’s December 2025 investigation — published on the fifth anniversary of the bombing — is the source for the FBI’s findings about what Anthony Warner believed, for the lead agent’s first public interview, and for the account given by the woman who warned police in 2019. Several things in the back half of this episode have never appeared anywhere else. They are his reporting, not ours.
Metro Nashville’s Department of Emergency Communications, for the public release of the August 21, 2019 call.
SOURCES
• Metro Nashville Police Department — body camera footage released December 28, 2020; press conference, December 27, 2020
• Federal Bureau of Investigation, Memphis Field Office — investigation findings released March 15, 2021
• WSMV4 News, Nashville — reporting by Jeremy Finley, December 22, 2025
• Metro Nashville Department of Emergency Communications — recorded call, August 21, 2019
• Metro Nashville Police Department After Action Review Board report
• Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency — damage assessment
• Contemporaneous reporting from the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Tennessean and NewsChannel 5
A NOTE
This episode discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day — call or text 988.
ABOUT THE SHOW
Nashvillains is a true crime podcast about the cases that happened here — in Music City and the counties around it. Written and hosted by Jerry Broadway. A production of Hey Dad Productions.