He holed up alone in his home, keeping visitors away and limiting contact with neighbours. A neighbour recalled that Jabbar had grown his beard long and had then cut it short again.
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Several residents said they had never seen him at prayers at the nearest mosque, and the spokesperson for the one farther away also said he did not remember him attending.
“We’d never seen him here worshipping in our lives, and I’ve been in this community since 2008,” one local resident, Taha Mohamed, said as he attended a prayer service last week.
Jabbar did not discuss his growing hardline religious beliefs with those around him, his neighbours said, even as he occasionally posted audio recordings espousing a conservative interpretation of Islam.
At Jabbar’s house, there were signs of a dual life. On his patio, the man who had worked for years in real estate and information technology had left behind several real estate yard signs. Inside, a laptop sat on a workstation with two monitors, and a bookshelf contained both the Quran and a book about Christianity.
Investigators wrote in documents of finding more ominous items that Jabbar had left behind, including supplies that could be used for an explosive device: acetone, bottles of sulphuric acid and bags labelled as potassium nitrate.
A black flag with white lettering lies on the ground of the ute Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar (inset) was driving. Credit: AP
The military ‘grounded him’
At the three-bedroom home in Beaumont, Texas, where Jabbar grew up, family members gathered this past week and looked through photos of his life that showed him smiling in his Little League gear and in a flowing red graduation gown and cap.
Jabbar had what seemed to be a relatively ordinary upbringing, said Abdur Rahim Jabbar IV, a 24-year-old half brother. He loved school and got good grades.
Jabbar’s father grew up as Christian but later turned to Islam, changing his last name from Young to Jabbar and also giving some of his children Arabic names. Still, many members of the family, who are all African American, continued attending a local Baptist church.
A relative of Jabbar’s, who did not want her name published for fear of being drawn into the case, said that even Jabbar and some of his brothers — who, like their father, converted to Islam — had lived largely secular lives. “I don’t think I ever heard the word Allah said,” she said.
Jabbar’s mother, who remained a Christian, later moved with Shamsud-Din and the couple’s other children to the Houston area after Jabbar’s third divorce.
At the University of Houston, Jabbar had taken in the college experience. He enjoyed college parties and alcohol so much, his half brother said, that it derailed his academics and eventually cost him a scholarship.
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By 2007, he had joined the US Army, eventually working in human resources and information technology, rising to the rank of staff sergeant, being deployed to Afghanistan and earning a Global War on Terrorism service medal. The army featured him in a 2013 post on Facebook. There, Jabbar’s mother replied with a comment, expressing her pride.
Jabbar told family members that he was grateful for his time in the military. “It set him straight,” his half brother said. “It gave him some discipline. It grounded him.”
After eight years of service, Jabbar attended Georgia State University. People who knew him saw no signs of religious extremism, though at least one friend described a growing interest in his Muslim faith.
He then turned to a white-collar professional career and returned to Texas.
‘A sign of the end times’
Jabbar’s personal troubles at first appeared in more worldly forms. There were divorces, business troubles and disputes over finances.
With the marital separations came alimony and child support for his two daughters, now 20 and 15, and his young son. In 2021, court records from his third divorce show that he was ordered to pay $US1350 a month to his third wife. He was working in real estate with his relatives to earn extra income, in part because of debts: the house involved in his divorce case was facing foreclosure, he reported in 2022 and $US27,000 was owed in back payments on the mortgage.
By the time that divorce was finalised in 2022, he had the job at Deloitte but he appeared to be paying over a quarter of his monthly salary in such support.
His third divorce appeared to be a bitter one in which his ex-wife asked the court to order Jabbar not to make threatening phone calls or harm either her or their son. It was not clear if he had ever harmed them in the past. His ex-wife declined requests for comment.
Over the past year, Jabbar appeared to some in his family to have begun acting erratically. A previous ex-wife and her husband moved to limit his contact with their children as his behaviour grew more unpredictable, seemingly influenced by his religious views, the husband said.
Jabbar’s closer family also saw signs that he was beginning to unravel, in part as a result of financial stress and divorce, but also of larger things in the world. After the war in the Middle East began in the northern autumn of 2023, Jabbar seemed uneasy with the carnage he saw on the news and social media, said his half brother, Abdur Jabbar.
“He didn’t like it; he said it was genocide on both sides, inhumane,” he said. “It was senseless.”
In the past year, Shamsud-Din Jabbar began growing a beard, which some family members shrugged off as an attempt to change his look and adopt the look of a traditional Muslim man. But he also began expressing disgust over what he saw as inappropriate behaviour.
Surveillance footage shows Shamsud-Din Jabbar an hour before the attack. Some in his family saw signs he was beginning to unravel.Credit: AP
“He didn’t approve of drinking or partying,” his half brother said. “He said it was not in accordance with what God commanded us to do. He said it wasn’t fruitful. He said it didn’t bring anything positive.”
Recordings about Islamic teachings were posted to an account on the audio website SoundCloud that appears to belong to Shamsud-Din Jabbar; the voice was verified by his half brother. In one of them, he said music had the power to lure people “into the things that God had made forbidden to us”, such as alcohol, marijuana, vulgarity and crime.
The recording goes on to suggest a connection between the release of Get Rich or Die Tryin’, a rap album by 50 Cent, and a series of murders in his neighbourhood. He said he worried that Muslims listening to such music were being drawn into evil.
“And the voice of Satan spreading among Prophet Muhammad’s followers – peace be upon him – is a sign of the end times,” he said in the message about a year ago, in early 2024.
‘The believers and the disbelievers’
His recordings reflected a growing conservatism in his beliefs. But investigators were still poring over his digital life to determine when he had made the jump to extremism and why, in the videos he recorded and posted to Facebook just before the attack, he had pledged himself to ISIS.
Nasser Weddady, an expert on Islamic extremism, said the views contained in the SoundCloud recordings showed a puritan bent but were not associated with a violent interpretation of the faith on their own.
The same SoundCloud account also included 16 other recordings that the user had “liked”, several of which expressed views about Islam that have sometimes been used by extremist groups as justification for killing non-Muslims.
The bigger question, Weddady said, “is, how did he go from blaming Muslims for straying from the straight path, to killing non-Muslims?”
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Abdur Jabbar said that when he had spoken to his half brother two weeks ago, Shamsud-Din Jabbar did not mention any plans to go to New Orleans.
At his Deloitte job, he set an out-of-office reply saying that he was taking some personal time off.
“Please expect a delay in response during this time,” the message said. “If the matter is time sensitive, please call or text me. Thanks kindly.”
Neighbours said Jabbar’s lease outside Houston was coming to an end and that he had told them before he departed on New Year’s Eve that he was moving to New Orleans.
After renting the ute on a peer-to-peer rental app, Jabbar headed for New Orleans, recording video messages along the way. In the first video, he referred to “animosity” with his family but he said he had decided not to follow through on a plan to harm them. Investigators said this was apparently because of a concern that news coverage of an attack that involved his family would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers”.
New Orleans police and federal agents investigate the New Year’s Day attack.Credit: AP
He started posting his videos at 1.29am and continued until 3.02am. His attack began just minutes later.
A US official who reviewed some of the footage filmed by Jabbar said that he “pledges bayat” to the Islamic State, an Arabic term referring to the oath of loyalty that ISIS followers are expected to pronounce as a way to signal their allegiance to the group.
Jabbar’s brother said he had not seen the videos addressed to the family.
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“It’s just hard to believe; it’s insane,” he said. “It’s unlike him.”
On Thursday afternoon, Abdur Jabbar pushed a wheelchair carrying his ailing father, who had suffered a stroke in 2022, to the home’s garage to meet with three FBI agents. The agents told the family, Abdur Jabbar said, that there were red flags showing that Shamsud-Din Jabbar had been radicalised.
“They want to know why he did this,” Abdur Jabbar said after the FBI questioning. “I could not give them an answer. That’s not the brother I know.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
