section_path: Perpetrator
section_name: Perpetrator
paragraph_text: Perpetrator
  
  The assailant, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar (October 26, 1982 – January 1, 2025), was 42 years old and absent from all federal watchlists. He was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, a city located 85 miles (137 km) east of Houston. At the time of the attack, he lived in a Houston neighborhood in northern Harris County. Although raised as a Christian, Jabbar converted to Islam and was a Muslim for most of his life.
  
  Jabbar came from an African American family that predominantly attended the local Baptist church. His father, a convert to Islam born in Houston, changed his surname from Young to Jabbar; his mother remained a Christian. His grandfather moved from Louisiana to Texas as part of a migration of Creoles of color to the Beaumont area for work. Jabbar was arrested in 2002 in Katy for misdemeanor theft and was arrested in 2005 for driving with an invalid license. In 2014, he pleaded guilty to driving under the influence while serving at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
  
  Jabbar served in the United States Army for ten years as a human resources specialist and an information technology specialist. He was deployed to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010. He was honorably discharged at the rank of staff sergeant. He left active duty in 2015, and was in the United States Army Reserve until 2020. He enrolled at Georgia State University in 2015 and graduated in 2017, receiving a Bachelor of Business Administration in computer information systems. Jabbar partied and used alcohol in college, causing his grades to slip and losing him a scholarship. Despite Jabbar's growing interest in Islam, his acquaintances saw no signs of extremism.
  
  Jabbar was divorced three times and had financial problems. His first marriage ended in divorce in 2012, he married again (2013 to 2016), and finally a third time (2017 to 2022). He secured a job at Deloitte in 2021 as a "senior solutions specialist" in government and public services with a yearly salary of $120,000, a quarter of which was spent in alimony and child support. The husband of one of his ex-wives said that Jabbar had been behaving unpredictably in the months before the attack, seemingly motivated by his religious views, and the couple decided to limit Jabbar's contact with their children.
  
  In 2024, Jabbar moved to a Muslim community north of Houston, where he isolated himself, and started publishing recordings to SoundCloud, in which he espoused conservative religious views. In the recordings, Jabbar condemned music as a gateway "into the things that God had made forbidden to us " such as alcohol and marijuana. In an early 2024 recording, he said that "the voice of Satan spreading among Prophet Muhammad's followers is a sign of the end times." He was not seen attending either of the two nearby mosques and was not a formal member of any of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston's 21 congregations. It is unclear exactly what factors influenced Jabbar's radicalization, although investigators said that his views became significantly more extreme after the beginning of the Gaza war in 2023. Jabbar traveled alone to Cairo, Egypt in late-June 2023, spending eleven days in the country, followed by a three-day stay in Ontario, Canada in mid-July; U.S. investigators are probing what Jabbar did while abroad.
  
  In videos posted to Facebook between 1:29 and 3:02 a.m.—minutes before the truck attack—Jabbar pledged allegiance (bay'at) to ISIS. He said he wanted his act to highlight the "war between the believers and the disbelievers " and that he had considered organizing a family "celebration" where he would have them "witness the killing of the apostates."
  
  The FBI said it was confident that Jabbar acted alone. While Jabbar took violent inspiration from ISIS, investigators have not found evidence he had received any direct contact or direction from the terrorist group. Possible self-radicalization reflects a pattern seen in previous jihadist attacks.