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Someone suggested is his daughter. Makes the simplest sense. She has ties to the TN area. His age and her age compared, he was roughly 34 when she was born. He obviously knows her even if she doesn’t know him. Child out of wedlock? If so he could have kept tabs on the mom and her through the years, but quietly.

Maybe terminal illness of his motivates the transfer to his only child, then lives in his RV?

If he’s sleeping in the RV in Nashville that night, he’d have the heater running. RV heaters are poweredby LP tanks. These heaters not only have a flame when operating, but also a pilot light burning and the ignition for the pilot light is usually an arc of electrical current.

If the AT&T building had a natural gas heater, or generator below ground and there was a gas leak, maybe it continued to leak until it reached a source of ignition.

...like the arcing spark of the RV heating system, the pilot light, or the main burner.

The ignition lights the fuel air cloud that has filled the air outside the sidewalk and the contained gas in the basement is the main explosive force. This blows the metal sidewalk grate/covers straight into the air. Shown by the second video which suggests something on top of the primary explosion being blasted straight upward. Except it isn’t STRAIGHT upward, it appears to go off about 10-15 degrees to the side. If it is the sidewalk cover then this slight deflection from straight up could be explained by either bouncing off something, like the exterior of a building, or the hinges of the cover creating slight resistance and the slightly deflected angle of flight.

The guy in the RV. He may have nobody for the holidays, living in his RV, went downtown to drink his troubles away and pulled over in an obscure spot to sleep it off. But that night this unfortunate soul picked the wrong spot.

...but that’s just my guess...