About a year ago, Jabbar moved into a rented home in a Muslim neighbourhood north of Houston. On Wednesday, access to much of the neighbourhood, including its local mosque, was blocked off by law enforcement as FBI investigators searched the area of trailers and small homes.
One of Jabbar’s neighbours, who was blocked from returning home during the search, said Jabbar kept to himself and usually stayed inside his home. The neighbour asked not to be named out of concern for his safety as a Muslim in the aftermath of the attack.
Jabbar’s brother, Abdur Jabbar, 24, said in an interview in Beaumont, Texas, where the brothers grew up, that they had been brought up Christian but that Shamsud-Din converted long ago.
“As far as I know, he was a Muslim for most of his life,” said the younger Jabbar. “What he did does not represent Islam. This is more some type of radicalisation, not religion.”
He added that his brother, who had a six-year-old son in addition to his older daughters, joined the military not knowing what he wanted to do in life.
“It was a new outlet to get some sort of discipline,” Jabbar said.
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Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar spent years in the military moving between states, ending up in Fort Bragg in North Carolina at one point, according to court documents, and being deployed once to Afghanistan. He worked mostly as an information technology specialist, according to a US Army statement. He was discharged from the Army Reserve in 2020 with the rank of staff sergeant.
Chris Pousson, 42, a retired Air Force veteran who also lived in Beaumont, said he attended middle school with “Sham”, as he was known then, and described him as “quiet, reserved and really, really smart”.
“He wasn’t a troublemaker at all,” Pousson said. “He made good grades and was always well dressed in button-ups and polo shirts.”
They reconnected on Facebook after Jabbar got out of active-duty military service in 2015, at which point Pousson noticed that Jabbar had become deeply involved in his Muslim faith.
“Before, if he was into it, he wasn’t open or verbal about it,” Pousson said. But at that point, he said, Jabbar was making lots of posts about religion on Facebook.
“It was never Muslim extremist stuff, and he was never threatening any violence, but you could see that he had gotten really passionate.”
Still, the attack came as a shock to him.
“This is a complete 180 from the quiet, reserved person I knew,” Pousson said.
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Jabbar had complained in the past about the challenges of life as a veteran. In a 2015 interview with Georgia State University’s student paper, Jabbar said the Department of Veterans Affairs had made it difficult to get paid through the GI bill. He attended the university from 2015 until 2017, when he received a bachelor’s degree in computer information systems, the school said.
“It’s such a large agency,” Jabbar explained to a student reporter. One missed signature or sheet of paper could mean slipping through the cracks. He also said he found it challenging to communicate without using military jargon.
More recently, Jabbar had tried to sell real estate. In a YouTube video from 2020 that appears to have been posted by Jabbar, he spoke positively about his skills, his lifelong history in Beaumont and his service in the military.
“I’ve been here all my life, with the exception of travelling for the military,” he said.
On a now-deleted Twitter account, Jabbar wrote in 2021 about his work in real estate and his interest in cryptocurrency. He also expressed an interest in firearms, once writing, “It’s a shoot-the-guns type of Saturday morning”.
He later posted a photo of two people standing while a third person fired a gun. An account with an identical username on a classifieds site dedicated to firearms shows that user trying to sell a pistol, ammunition and a shotgun. The posts on that website were made in November and December.
Jabbar did not appear to have a history of violence. Criminal records in Texas show charges for minor infractions two decades ago – misdemeanour theft in 2002, and driving with an invalid licence in 2005.
The vehicle used in the New Orleans attack, an electric Ford pick-up, was registered to a Houston man who made vehicles available for rent on a peer-to-peer car-sharing website. That man, who asked that his name not be made public, said the FBI called him and he explained that he had not been driving the vehicle but had rented it out. He said he had been asked by the federal agents not to discuss the matter publicly.
In the midst of his second divorce in January 2022, Jabbar wrote an email to his wife’s lawyer in which he described financial problems.
“I cannot afford the house payment,” he wrote.
“It is past due in excess of $US27,000 ($43,000) and in danger of foreclosure if we delay settling the divorce.”
He said in the email that the business corporation he had formed, a real estate company, had lost more than $US28,000 in the previous year and that he had taken on $US16,000 in credit card debt.
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At the same time, in a court document from later that same year, he said he worked at the accounting firm Deloitte and made about $US120,000 a year. A company spokesperson said Jabbar had served in a “staff-level role since being hired in 2021”.
“He was no terrorist to me,” said Marilyn Bradford, 70, who lived upstairs from Jabbar in a Houston apartment building where he lived from 2021 until about a year ago.
Before he left, she said, he gave her a dryer, a steamer and other household supplies.
“I said, ‘Oh, you are giving me something to remember you by?’ He laughed, like he always did,” she said. “He was an outcast person. I was the only one he really talked to. I used to refer to him as my buddy.”
Bradford said she would see him spending time on the weekend with his three children, and he was always helpful.
“He would ask, ‘Ma’am, do you want me to help you with that?’ He would help me carry my groceries.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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