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‘No Terrorist to Me’: Relatives and Friends Saw Few Signs Before Attack
Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar appeared to be living a quiet but dutiful life of work and faith amid Houston’s sprawling diversity: a veteran of the U.S. Army who studied information technology, converted to Islam and recently held a six-figure job.
Little in his outward persona suggested someone who could be responsible for what the authorities described as a brutal terrorist attack along one of the most famous streets in the United States on New Year’s Day.
In a white pickup rented in Houston, the authorities said, Mr. Jabbar, rammed through a crowd of revelers around 3 a.m. on Bourbon Street in New Orleans before opening fire, killing at least 15 people in one of the nation’s worst terror attacks.
Mr. Jabbar died in a shootout with the police, officials said. In the truck, they found an Islamic State flag, and a senior law enforcement official said that Mr. Jabbar had posted several videos to his Facebook account Tuesday evening, apparently addressed to his family and recorded while he was driving, in which he “pledged allegiance to ISIS.”
Officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation were still trying to determine a motive for the attack, and believed that Mr. Jabbar “was not solely responsible.” Several improvised explosive devices were found and disposed of, officials said.
The violence appeared to explode out of nowhere to those who had known Mr. Jabbar as a smart, caring brother and a quiet, helpful neighbor. But there were also signs of growing instability in his life.
Mr. Jabbar divorced his first wife, Nakedra Charrlle Marsh in 2012, then struggled with adjusting to civilian life after leaving active-duty military service about a decade ago. He divorced a second wife, and was separated from his third.
Dwayne Marsh, who is married to Mr. Jabbar’s ex-wife, Ms. Marsh, said Mr. Jabbar had been acting erratically in recent months, “being all crazy, cutting his hair” after converting to Islam. Mr. Marsh said he and his wife stopped allowing the two daughters she shared with Mr. Jabbar, ages 15 and 20, to spend time with him.
About a year ago, Mr. Jabbar moved into a rented home in a Muslim neighborhood north of Houston. On Wednesday, access to much of the neighborhood, including its local mosque, was blocked off by law enforcement as F.B.I. investigators searched the area of trailers and small homes.
One of Mr. Jabbar’s neighbors, who was blocked from returning home during the search, said Mr. Jabbar kept to himself and usually stayed inside his home. The neighbor asked not to be named out of concern for his safety as a Muslim in the aftermath of the attack.
Mr. Jabbar’s brother, Abdur Jabbar, 24, said in an interview in Beaumont, Texas, where the brothers grew up, that they last spoke two weeks ago and that his brother did not mention any plans or a desire to go to New Orleans.
He said that they had been brought up Christian but that his brother had long ago converted to Islam. “As far as I know he was a Muslim for most of his life,” said the younger Mr. Jabbar. “What he did does not represent Islam. This is more some type of radicalization, not religion.”
He added that his brother, who had a 6-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,” Mr. Jabbar said.
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 deploying once to Afghanistan. He worked mostly as an information technology specialist, according to a U.S. 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 lives in Beaumont, said he attended middle school and high 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,” Mr. Pousson said. “He made good grades and was always well-dressed in button-ups and polo shirts.”
They reconnected on Facebook after Mr. Jabbar got out of active-duty military service in 2015, at which point Mr. Pousson noticed that Mr. Jabbar had become deeply involved in his Muslim faith.
“Before, if he was into it, he wasn’t open or verbal about it,” Mr. Pousson said. But at that point, he said, Mr. 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,” he said.
Mr. 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, Mr. Jabbar said that the Department of Veterans Affairs had made it difficult to get paid through the G.I. Bill. He attended G.S.U. from 2015 until 2017, when he received a bachelor’s degree in computer information systems, the school said.
“It’s such a large agency,” Mr. 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, Mr. Jabbar had tried to sell real estate. In a YouTube video from 2020 that appears to have been posted by Mr. 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 traveling for the military,” he said.
On a now-deleted Twitter account, Mr. 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.
But Mr. Jabbar did not appear to have a history of violence. Criminal records in Texas show charges for minor infractions two decades ago — misdemeanor theft in 2002, driving with an invalid license in 2005.
The vehicle used in the New Orleans attack, an electric Ford pickup, 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 F.B.I. 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.
Records show that Mr. Jabbar was married three times, with his first marriage ending in 2012, and his second, in Georgia, ending a few years after that. Back in Texas and in the midst of a third divorce, in January 2022, Mr. 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 $27,000 and in danger of foreclosure if we delay settling the divorce,” he wrote.
He said in the email that the business corporation he had formed, a real estate company, had lost more than $28,000 in the previous year and that he had taken on $16,000 in credit card debt.
At the same time, he said in a court document from later that same year, he said he worked at the accounting firm Deloitte and made about $120,000 a year. A company spokesman said Mr. 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 Mr. 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.”
Ms. Bradford said she would see him spending time on the weekend with his three children, and was always helpful. “He would ask, ‘Ma’am, do you want me to help you with that?’ He would help me carry my groceries.”
