Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez came from “your average Chattanooga family,” said a former high school classmate.
“Their whole family seemed normal,” Kagan Wagner told the Chattanooga Times Free-Press.
Abdulazeez’s high school teachers recalled him as a brilliant student, who went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at University of Tennessee Chattanooga.
No one, including the FBI, apparently expected any malevolence from Abdulazeez, who would embark Thursday morning on a mass shooting spree that left four U.S. Marines dead. The Marines were trapped in a no-gun zone with no way to defend themselves at the Navy Reserve Center in Chattanooga, a situation eerily similar to the Fort Hood incident in 2009 in which Maj. Nidal Hasan murdered 12 of his fellow soldiers.
Wagner attended Red Bank High School with Abdulazeez and described him as “quiet” but well-liked.
“He was friendly, funny, kind,” Wagner told the newspaper. “I never would have thought it would be him.”
One reader of the Times Free-Press emailed photos to the paper of Abdulazeez’s senior picture. His quote in the school yearbook now takes on a tragic irony.
“My name causes national security alerts,” the quote reads. “What does yours do?”
But in reality, the FBI said he was “not on our radar at all.”
And behind that friendly face was the heart of a jihadi. His personal blog post three days before the killing spree all but announced his intentions. “Life is short and bitter and Muslims should not let the opportunity to submit to allah pass you by,” he wrote.
The FBI somehow missed it. That may have been the day’s most stunning admission, made in an age when the NSA has been monitoring every American’s cellphone and Internet activity.
Here is what WND has been able to learn so far about Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez.
He was born in Kuwait in 1990 and had Jordanian citizenship. At some point, he emigrated to the United States with his family and became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
An ISIS affiliated Twitter account tweeted 15 minutes before the attack started a “warning” to America with the #Chattanooga hashtag (see screenshot above article). Could this have been the signal that started the attack? Authorities refused to comment on that Thursday, but a similar Twitter message came just before the ISIS attack in Garland, Texas in early May. This pattern suggests ISIS may have sleeper cells it is able to activate within the United States.
The FBI said Abdulazeez was not on its radar and that the attack came as a total surprise. He lived in Hixon, Tennessee, a suburb of Chattanooga. He pulled up to the recruitment offices in a silver Mustang convertible without license plates. He stopped the car and started shooting from the front seat.
Two to three dozen shots penetrated the glass doors of the military recruitment offices — leaving bullet holes in a tight pattern. That indicates he was well-trained in the use of an automatic or semi-automatic rifle. He fired off 40 to 50 rounds and then sped off to his second destination, the Navy Reserve Center about 7 miles away.
Abdulazeez attended high school in the Chattanooga area, according to the Chattanooga Times-News Free Press.
“I never would have thought it would have been him,” Wagner said. “They were your average Chattanooga family.”
A man named Youssuf Abdulazeez attended the University of Tennessee a Chattanooga, spokesman Chuck Cantrell confirmed, and graduated in 2012 with a degree in engineering.
The Pentagon is looking into whether he has any military background but it appears he did not. The two sites he attacked were only a few miles from his house so he could have simply picked the most convenient soft target where he knew unarmed U.S. military would be present.
Kevin Emily, his former high school wrestling coach, described Abdulazeez as “a great student” who sometimes missed practice to pray.
“He always contributed, always did what I asked him to do. I never had any problems out of Mohammad,” Emily told CNN’s “Erin Burnett: Outfront.” “He was very humble when he was in high school. He’d always listen to me, looked me in the eye. He was just — in high school he was a great kid.”
His father was a government worker employed with the local public works department.
Police in Hixson kicked a reporter out of the neighborhood that contained a house apparently owned by Abdulazeez’s father, according to the Times Free-Press, indicating that the shooter was living at his parents’ house. The house, which Hamilton County records is owned by Youssuf S. Abdulazeez, is appraised at $206,100 by the Hamilton County Assessor of Property.
Obama responds
“We take all shootings very seriously,” President Obama said Thursday evening. “As we have more information we’ll let the public know, but in the meantime I ask all Americans to pray for the families that are grief stricken at this point and I want all to know we will be thorough and prompt in figuring out what happened.”
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called the attack a “heinous crime.”
Neither Obama nor Carter mentioned anything about Islamism or terrorism.
The lure of ISIS
But FBI Director James Comey was clear about the risk facing America in a recent congressional hearing.
The message of ISIS is, “Come to the so-called caliphate, and if you can’t, kill somebody. Kill somebody where you are,” Comey said.
The U.S. allows about 100,000 immigrants to enter legally from predominantly Muslim countries every year, through the refugee resettlement program, through employment-based and student-based visa programs among other programs.
Rep. Michael McCall, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has been pushing the Obama administration to slow the flow of immigration from certain jihadist countries, namely Syria, since February. He has complained that the White House has not given an adequate response to his concerns. He has called the Syrian refugee program a potential “back door” for jihadists, but no one in Congress has addressed the broader issue of Muslim immigration involving the entire array of entry points into the country.
Immigration from Middle East on the rise
In fact, Sen. Marco Rubio’s “I-Squared” bill in the Senate and the SKILLS Visa Act in the House would triple the number of skilled guest-workers allowed into the U.S. each year and offer an unlimited number of university student visas. Many of them come from Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Yemen. They graduate from U.S. universities and then go to work in the U.S. on H1B work visas.
From Syria alone more than 700 students are currently enrolled in U.S. colleges, reports the New York Times.
McCaul issued the following statement about Thursday’s attack by a Kuwaiti-born Muslim whose family emigrated to America.
“The targeting of our military personnel who volunteer to protect our freedoms strikes at the heart of our country. We must remain alert to the fact that there are people right here in America who are intent on striking from within. And we must remain vigilant in our efforts to counter the evil and twisted ideology that drives vulnerable minds into unconscionable acts of violence and hate. The families of the Marines killed are in my thoughts and prayers and to those who were injured I hope for a speedy recovery.”
