AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The Latest on the Austin bombings investigation (all times local):
1 p.m.
The president of the Austin chapter of the NAACP is calling on investigators to release the recording of what the authorities have referred to as the dead bomber’s confession.
Nelson Linder said Friday that the public should get to hear the entire 25-minute recording so that everyone can learn more about the suspected bomber, Mark Anthony Conditt.
Hey says select details of the recording have been described or leaked to the news media “in bits and pieces, which is problematic.”
Interim police chief Brian Manley has said the recording portrays the 23-year-old Conditt as a troubled young man but doesn’t reveal a motive. Police have declined to release it for now, citing the ongoing investigation.
Authorities say Conditt planted four bombs in Austin this month that killed two people and injured four others.
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11:40 a.m.
The 17-year-old high school student who was one of two people killed in the Austin bombings would have learned Friday that he had been admitted to the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
Michael Manderen, the admissions director for the Ohio-based conservatory, says Draylen Mason would have been offered one of 130 spots next fall. That’s out of a pool of 1,500 applicants.
Manderen says the decision was made before March 12, when Mason was killed by a package bomb, but acceptance decisions aren’t conveyed to applicants until Friday afternoon.
He says the school informed Mason’s stand-up bass teacher on Thursday that he would have been accepted. He says Mason’s death was tragic and “our hearts go out to the family and community.”
Mason had also been accepted to other schools. The bomb that killed him also injured his mother.
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11 a.m.
The supervisor of the fugitive task force that helped apprehend the suspected Austin bomber says it’s the most rewarding case in his 23-year career.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Darren Sartin, who heads the Lone Star Fugitive Task Force, said Friday that his team found Mark Anthony Conditt’s vehicle in the parking lot of a hotel outside Austin around 2 a.m. Wednesday.
He says that before Austin Police Department SWAT officers arrived, he saw someone inside the vehicle and it took off as officers pursued.
Sartin says the SWAT team caught up about a mile away. Police say Conditt detonated a bomb and died.
Sartin says his task force arrests hundreds of the region’s worst criminals every year, but “this guy was way beyond them.”
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