It appears the Austin bomber's brief reign of terror is over.
Five explosions, two dead, four injured. Police and federal agents combed the city for clues.
They took on the tedious task of going through receipts from chain and local stores, looking for suspicious sales. It worked. The clincher was security video of a man dropping off two packages at the FedEx store. Authorities put it all together to come up with a person of interest: Mark Anthony Conditt.
Cellphone technology allowed them to trace Conditt late Tuesday evening to a hotel north of Austin. While police waited for backup specially trained in explosives, the suspect drove away in his car.
Police followed Conditt down a service road until his car came to a stop in a ditch. As the SWAT team approached to make an arrest, there was an explosion inside the car.
Conditt was killed. Three weeks of terror came to a close that night. Maybe.
Authorities say caution is still called for. No one is sure whether Conditt might have sent or planted other devices before he died.
We commend the hard work law enforcement did on this case. Now comes the equally difficult task of determining exactly why someone would do something like this.
Bombings are still uncommon in this country, and when they happen, they are usually isolated incidents directed at specific targets, often based on a personal grudge over some perceived wrong.
That's what made the Austin bombings so terrifying. They apparently were a series of random attacks, no rhyme or reason to them other than to inflict death, destruction and fear.
It's something that could happen to any of us, anywhere-even here in the Twin Cities-especially when e-commerce means we receive more packages delivered to our doors than ever before. We think nothing of it when we pick up and open these parcels.
Some may decide it's time to rethink that, but in our view, we can't let something like this disrupt our daily lives. It's not impossible this could happen here, but it's very, very unlikely. In any case, you can't plan for or prevent every possibility, but you can waste a lot of time and precious peace of mind trying.