Ramming attack in New Orleans dampens New Years revelries

The man killed in a shootout with the police after ramming into dozens of revelers in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day was Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a native of Texas who had served several years ago with the U.S. Army, officials confirmed on Wednesday as they sought to determine a motivation for the attack.

The FBI said that it was examining an Islamic State group flag found in the truck used in the attack and that investigators believe Jabbar “was not solely responsible.” Several improvised explosive devices were found and disposed of, officials said.

Jabbar’s brother, Abdur Jabbar, said in an interview that the two of them spoke a couple of weeks ago but that Shamsud-Din Jabbar did not mention any plans to go to New Orleans. He said his brother “was a sweetheart, really — a nice guy, a friend, really smart, caring.”

“I’m honestly shocked by all of this,” the brother said. “I would have never imagined him doing something like this.”

Abdur Jabbar said that they had grown up as Christians and that his brother had converted to Islam at some point, but that he believed that if his brother had indeed been involved in the New Orleans attack, it was “more some type of radicalization, not religion.”

Dwayne Marsh, who is married to Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s ex-wife Nakedra Charrlle, also said that Jabbar had converted to Islam.

Marsh said that Jabbar and Charrlle had two daughters, ages 15 and 20, who “are a mess” after the attack.

In recent months, he said, Jabbar had been acting erratically, “being all crazy, cutting his hair.” Marsh and his wife then stopped allowing the daughters to spend time with Jabbar, he said. Jabbar’s brother said he also had a 6-year-old son.

About a year ago, Shamsud-Din Jabbar moved into a rented home in a Muslim neighborhood north of Houston. On Wednesday, much of the neighborhood, including its local mosque, was blocked off by law enforcement as FBI investigators searched along the area of trailers and small homes.

One of Jabbar’s neighbors, who was blocked from returning home during the search, said Jabbar kept to himself and always remained 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.

Chris Pousson, 42, a retired Air Force veteran in Beaumont, attended middle school with “Sham,” as Jabbar was known, in Nederland, Texas. The boys were in the same class at Central High School in Beaumont, graduating in 2001. Pousson remembered him being “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.”

Both later entered the military and then reconnected on Facebook when Jabbar’s service ended, around 2017. He recalled that Jabbar at that point had grown passionate about the Muslim faith in a way that Pousson had not seen before.

“It was never Muslim extremist stuff, and he was never threatening any violence, but you could see that he had gotten really passionate about his faith,” he said.

Jabbar was still working professional jobs. In a YouTube video from 2020 that appears to have been posted by Jabbar, he spoke positively about his skills in real estate. He said he had been born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, and had served in the U.S. military.

“I’ve been here all my life, with the exception of traveling for the military,” he said. The Army said Wednesday that Jabbar served for eight years, deploying to Afghanistan for a year ending in January 2010. He worked as both a human resource specialist and an information technology specialist, holding the rank of staff sergeant at the end of his service.

On a now-deleted account on the social platform X, Jabbar wrote at times 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 lists for sale a pistol, ammunition and a shotgun. The posts on that website were made in November and December.

Criminal records in Texas show that Jabbar had previously been charged with minor infractions — once in 2002 for a misdemeanor theft and once in 2005 for driving with an invalid license.

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 that he and his family had been preparing for an outing to the zoo on Wednesday morning when he saw the news of the attack and recognized his truck as the one involved.

The man 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.

Records show that Jabbar was married twice, with his first marriage, to Charrlle, ending in 2012. In the midst of a 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 $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 in order to pay for lawyers and for “establishing a second residence.” He suggested in the email that he and his wife sell the house and divide the proceeds evenly.

But in a court document from August 2022, he said he worked at the accounting firm Deloitte and made about $120,000 a year.

After he left the Army, Jabbar described struggling to acclimate to civilian life, and he resented the sometimes sluggish and convoluted disbursal of veterans benefits.

In a 2015 interview with Georgia State University’s student paper, where he was attending college, Jabbar complained that the Department of Veterans Affairs had made it difficult to get paid through the G.I. Bill. A student by that name attended GSU from 2015 until 2017, and received a bachelor’s degree in computer information systems, the school said.

“It’s such a large agency,” Jabbar said, and with so many men and women coming out of the military, “you have to do your due diligence, make sure you have your paperwork together.” One missed signature or sheet of paper could mean slipping through the cracks, Jabbar explained.

He also said he found it challenging to communicate without using military jargon.

“You may have a lot of skills and training from the Army,” Jabbar said. “But you may not be able to speak the language to really translate it and be understood when you apply for a civilian job.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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