New Orleans suspect faced family and money struggles

BEAUMONT, Texas - Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the Texas man accused of crashing a truck into New Year’s Day revellers in New Orleans,

killing 14 and injuring dozens

, was a US Army veteran struggling to get past a recent divorce but who showed no signs of anger just weeks prior to the attack, his half-brother said.

Federal officials and local law enforcement in New Orleans say Jabbar had an ISIS flag on his pickup truck and posted a series of videos to social media professing his allegiance to the deadly militant group shortly before barrelling into the Bourbon Street crowd on the morning of Jan 1.

But what caused the 42-year-old Jabbar, a US citizen raised in Texas, to be radicalised remains unknown. He died at the scene in a shoot-out with police, officials said.

Mr Abdur Rahim Jabbar, the suspect’s half-brother, said he had not noticed anything off-kilter when the two last spoke a few weeks ago, though he knew his half-brother was having trouble getting business ventures off the ground and was coming off his second divorce.

“He was maybe looking for some types of answers,” Mr Jabbar told Reuters in an interview at his home in Beaumont, Texas, noting that his half-brother had recently renewed his Muslim faith after abandoning it in his 20s and 30s.

“He was smart, funny, charismatic, loving, compassionate, humble, and literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. That’s why it’s so devastating,” he added. “This degree of maliciousness is not like him. We are trying to understand what changed, too.”

Jabbar had faced family and financial struggles in recent years, according to public records and interviews.

His father had a stroke in 2023 and Jabbar was helping arrange for his care, Mr Abdur Jabbar said. That came on the heels of Jabbar’s divorce in September 2022 from his second wife, with whom he fathered one child, court records show.

In an e-mail to his then wife’s lawyer in January 2022, Jabbar said he was behind on mortgage payments on his home.

“I cannot afford the house payment. It is past due in excess of US$27,000 (S$37,000) and in danger of foreclosure if we delay settling the divorce,” Jabbar wrote in the e-mail, in which he detailed the losses he said he had incurred on the real estate business he started, as well as $16,000 in credit card debt.

However, the divorce records also show that Jabbar was then pulling in US$10,000 a month in salary from his job at Deloitte, one of the world’s top audit, tax and consulting firms.

“We are shocked to learn of reports that the individual identified as a suspect had any association with our firm,” Deloitte said in a statement, confirming that Jabbar had worked in a staff-level position since his hiring in 2021.

Deployed to Afghanistan

Jabbar served in the army as a human resources and information technology specialist from 2007 until 2015. He then joined the Army Reserve as an IT specialist until 2020, holding the rank of staff sergeant at the end of service, the army said.

Jabbar’s service included a deployment to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010 in a non-combatant role.

Mr Rich Groen, who said he was Jabbar’s commander in Afghanistan, said Jabbar “worked quietly and professionally” in his administrative roles, calling him a “great soldier” who “showed discipline and dedication”.

“To think that the same individual who once embodied quiet professionalism could harbour so much hate, leading to such unspeakable atrocities, is incomprehensible and heartbreaking,” Mr Groen wrote in a social media post.

In the first of five videos posted to Facebook before the attack, Jabbar said he previously planned to harm his family and friends, but was worried the media coverage would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers”, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) deputy assistant director Christopher Raia told a briefing on Jan 2.

Jabbar also said in the videos that he had joined ISIS before last summer and provided his last will and testament, according to Mr Raia, who said the FBI was still investigating Jabbar’s “path to radicalisation”.

Jabbar did not have a violent criminal record prior to the attack, though he was sentenced to 12 months’ probation for driving under the influence in 2015 and charged with misdemeanours in 2002 and 2005, public records show.

Mr Chris Pousson, a childhood friend of Jabbar’s who said he last interacted with him in 2018 or 2019 on Facebook, said that as time went on, Jabbar had become more vocal about his Muslim faith but that it was always in expressions of kindness.

“Every time we spoke, even up until the time when we stopped communicating back and forth, he was always very positive,” Mr Pousson said in an interview on TMZ. “I had no idea that he was capable of doing this.” REUTERS