Military records and media interviews are painting a clearer portrait of Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the 42-year-old Texas man accused of crashing a truck into New Year’s Day revelers in New Orleans, killing at least 14 people.
Jabbar served in the US army for 13 years, including a deployment to Afghanistan. On Thursday, the FBI said investigators believe Jabbar acted alone when he attacked the busy intersection of Bourbon and Canal streets. Officials had earlier said they believed Jabbar had accomplices.
The FBI has said Jabbar had a flag of Islamic State, the Sunni Muslim militant group, on his truck and the bureau is treating the attack as an act of terrorism.
The FBI also announced that it had found no definitive link between the New Orleans attack and the explosion that occurred later on Wednesday outside a hotel owned by Donald Trump in Las Vegas.
Jabbar appears to have been born and raised in Beaumont, Texas.
He served in the army as a human resource specialist and information technology specialist from 2007 until 2015, according to an army official, and deployed to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010.
He joined the army reserve as an IT specialist until 2020, holding the rank of staff sergeant at the end of service, according to the army official.
In addition to serving in the army, Jabbar had previously enlisted in the navy in August 2004 under a delayed entry program but was discharged a month later, a navy official told Reuters.
Jabbar graduated with a computer information systems degree from Georgia State University after studying there from 2015 to 2017, school officials told Atlanta News First.
Corporate and other records show that he got involved in a series of real estate businesses in recent years.
In a promotional video for a real estate business posted to YouTube in 2020, a man with the same name as the suspect said his time in the military had taught him the importance of great service and taking everything seriously.
“I’ve taken those skills and applied them to my career as a real estate agent, where I feel like what really sets me apart from other agents is my ability to be able to be a fierce negotiator,” he said, encouraging clients to give him a call.
In the video, the man introduced himself as a manager at Blue Meadow Properties LLC, a Texas-based company whose license expired in 2022. He was registered as a real estate sales agent for four years through February 2023, records show.
He also worked for the consulting firm Deloitte, where he made as much as $10,000 a month doing business development and other work, according to the Associated Press.
But Jabbar also faced a series of personal and financial challenges. He had been married and divorced at least three times, according to the AP, and his divorce records reflect a deteriorating financial situation.
Online Texas criminal court records show Jabbar had relatively minor offenses in his past, including a misdemeanor theft and driving with an invalid license before his military service.
According to court documents reviewed by CBS, one of Jabbar’s ex-wives accused him of “excessive cash withdrawals”, “unnecessary and unreasonable spending” and the “accumulation of debt”, as well as giving gifts to romantic partners.
In January 2022, Jabbar said he was $27,000 behind on house payments, writing in an email to his now ex-wife’s attorney: “I have exhausted all means of bringing the loan current other than a loan modification, leaving us no alternative but to sell the house or allow it to go into foreclosure.”
Dwayne Marsh, the new husband of Jabbar’s ex-wife, Nakedra Charrlle, told the New York Times that Jabbar had converted to Islam at some point. More recently, Jabbar’s behaviour had become erratic, he said, prompting the couple to stop allowing Jabbar to spend time with the daughters he shared with Charrlle.
Officials say Jabbar posted several videos to his Facebook account in the hours before the attack aligning himself with Islamic State. The videos included one in which he said he had originally planned to harm his family and friends, but was concerned that news headlines would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers”, officials said.
Relatives of Jabbar said on Thursday they were taken by surprise. “It’s completely contradictory to who he was and how his family and his friends know him,” Abdur-Rahim Jabbar, his younger brother, told the Associated Press.
The 24-year-old said his older brother had increasingly isolated himself from family and friends. It had been few months since he had seen his brother in person, and a few weeks since they talked on the phone. But, the younger brother said, “nothing about his demeanor seemed to be off. He didn’t seem to be angry or anything like that. He was just his calm, well-mannered, well-tempered self.”
A childhood friend of Jabbar’s, Chris Pousson – who last spoke to Jabbar some time in 2017 or 2018 – told NBC: “What happened today was a complete 180 of anything I ever knew about him.”
“He was very quiet, very reserved, smart, articulate,” Pousson said.
According to Pousson, he initially met Jabbar in 1996 during middle school. Following their high school graduation, they lost contact when Jabbar joined the army and Pousson went into the air force, NBC reported.
Upon reconnecting with Jabbar several years later on Facebook, Pousson said, he noticed that Jabbar’s posts focused on his Muslim beliefs, saying: “It was always positive – peace be with you, uplifting type of stuff … Nothing that he posted online that I saw was negative.”
With the investigation under way, the FBI has set up a digital tip line and has directed anyone with information or video of the incident to submit it to the agency.
