CNN
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the terrorist who killed 14 people in New Orleans in the early hours of New Year’s Day, told his college newspaper a decade ago he was struggling to acclimate to life as a civilian after serving in the military.
The U.S. Army veteran studied at Georgia State University from 2015 to 2017, and in his first year on campus, he was interviewed for The Signal as part of a story about students jumping through hoops to use the G.I. Bill.
Jabbar told reporter Sean Keenan it was difficult to use the G.I. Bill for his tuition, and he was having a hard time getting used to being a college student. He told Keenan he didn’t know how to talk to regular folks without using military slang.
Keenan, now a contributor to The New York Times, remembers his 2015 interaction with Jabbar … telling CNN Jabbar came off as a “very cool, calm and collected guy.”
While Keenan says nothing about Jabbar’s character raising any red flags at the time, he recalls Jabbar being reserved and distant “in the way that you sometimes see from veterans that have had difficult deployments.”
Jabbar served 8 years in the Army and was deployed to Afghanistan … and his younger brother says he enlisted because he didn’t know what to do with his life and needed discipline.
Keenan says his head’s been spinning since he realized he interviewed Jabbar back in the day … and he only connected the dots after a fellow journalist found his old story.