It was a quiet spring night in East Tennessee when a police officer noticed the old gray Toyota Camry rolling slowly through the downtown streets, swerving out of its lane and stopping for green lights.
Mohammod Abdulazeez — a dark-haired 24-year-old, about six feet tall with a sturdy wrestler’s build — was asked to step out of the car. A second officer who had arrived noticed, according to court records, that Mr. Abdulazeez’s eyelids were droopy, that he smelled of alcohol and marijuana, and that a “white powdery substance” was dusted around his nostrils. Mr. Abdulazeez told them that he had snorted crushed caffeine.
Less than three months after the April 20 drunken driving arrest that followed this traffic stop, Mr. Abdulazeez would exhort readers of his blog to put their “desires to the side” so that Allah might guide them “to what is right.”
And on Thursday, the authorities say, he fatally shot four Marines and a Navy petty officer here, then died in a gun battle with the police. The sailor, Petty Officer Second Class Randall Smith, 26, died early Saturday. Petty Officer Smith, a logistics specialist in the Navy, suffered three gunshot wounds and underwent surgery after the attack.
In the aftermath of the shootings, many of the people who knew Mr. Abdulazeez — classmates, neighbors, fellow athletes, fellow Muslims — spoke of the nimble way he and his Chattanooga-area family navigated both the secular, suburban world here and the more conservative reality of the Middle East, where he was born and his parents, Jordanians of Palestinian descent, still have relatives.
But there were also problems in their lives, and tensions among them, that disturbed their existence beyond neighbors’ sight. A July 30 court date for the D.U.I. charge loomed over Mr. Abdulazeez, even as he calmly attended prayer services at the local mosque. He was dismissed from a job at an Ohio nuclear plant in 2013 just 10 days after starting, possibly after failing a drug test.
Shootings in Chattanooga
A gunman opened fire at a military recruiting office at about 10:45 a.m. Thursday. A police chase ensued, and several people were killed at a naval reserve center about 30 minutes later.
Nearly a decade ago, his father was added to, then eventually dropped from, a terrorist watch list after the authorities began an investigation, later closed without charges, into whether he had given money to an organization with possible ties to Hamas. In what might have been a wry reference to that investigation, the son wrote on his high school yearbook page: “My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?”
Court records say his mother sought a divorce in early 2009, alleging that her husband physically abused her and their children and, citing Islamic law, wanted to take a second wife. The couple, now married over 30 years, reconciled.
Federal authorities said they were in the early stages of an investigation and had yet to ascribe a motive to the shootings or find evidence of ties to terrorist groups. They were looking closely at the young man’s overseas travel, which included several trips to Jordan and Kuwait, where he had relatives, most recently for seven months last year.
Mr. Abdulazeez had written recently on his blog of submitting to Allah, and one friend has come forward to say he seemed changed after his most recent trip to the Middle East. But other friends, neighbors and fellow worshipers said they had not seen evidence of radicalization. Their most enduring image is of an accomplished family that, in this city of increasing diversity, seemed to be fitting in.
“If I were his dad, I would be trying to find out who radicalized my child,” said Charles Jones, a neighbor. “Somebody got to that young man somewhere.”
For 14 years, Mr. Abdulazeez’s parents, Youssuf and Rasmia raised their five children in Colonial Shores, a handsome, middle-class subdivision in Hixson, Tenn., near the banks of the Tennessee River.
Mr. Jones and his wife, Karen, who have lived next door to the family for all that time, said that when they invited the family to their home for dinner, the family responded in kind. And when the Joneses were struggling to remove an old hot tub from their deck, Mohammod and a friend “just walked over and volunteered to help.”
The elder Mr. Abdulazeez is a soil engineering specialist in Chattanooga’s Public Works Department. But he often worked weekends selling cosmetics and perfumes at a flea market, neighbors said, causing him to neglect his overgrown lawn. A regular at prayer services at the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga, which includes a popular mosque on the east side of town, he said on his Facebook page that he was from Nablus, a town in the West Bank; United States officials confirmed that he and his wife are of Palestinian descent. Citizens of Jordan, the couple also lived in Kuwait, where Mohammod was born in 1990.
Dean McDaniel, who lives two houses down from the family’s aging, two-story, light-green house, said two of Mohammod’s sisters wore headscarves in the traditional Muslim style and babysat for his children.
Several years ago, Mr. and Ms. Jones recalled, Youssuf Adbulazeez invited them to the wedding of one of his daughters. They believed that they were among the few Christians at the wedding, an elaborate affair in downtown Chattanooga. They said there were several hundred people there, with food and dancing and a speech by Youssuf. “They were very gracious, brought us right in and made us feel very comfortable,” said Mr. Jones, an Air Force veteran.
The youngest daughter, Yasmeen, now 22, played on the girls’ soccer team at Red Bank High School, said Jake Parker, who also went to school there.
When Mr. Parker was a freshman, he recalled, Yasmeen visited a class in which he was enrolled, which was studying religious diversity. “She was just giving information on the misconception of how a lot of Christians see Islam as just terrorism, and things of that nature,” he said.
Mr. Abdulazeez attended Red Bank as well. He once stood up for a younger boy who was overweight and a bit of an outcast, Mr. Parker recalled.
He also joined the wrestling team and proved his talent. In an interview with CNN, his coach, Kevin Emily, called him “one of the guys” who would occasionally miss practice for religious reasons, and whose parents often showed up to cheer him on.
Mr. Jones said the father had taught the son to shoot with pellet and BB gun practice sessions in the backyard, sometimes using bottles and cast-iron pans as targets. Youssuf came by to ask Mr. Jones if he would mind.
“He says, ‘In my country, every young man of age has a gun,’ ” Mr. Jones recalled. “I said, ‘OK.’ He says, ‘My son and I, I want to teach him to shoot a gun.’ ”
Mr. Jones said father, son and friends had most recently practiced a little over a week ago.Mr. Jones would often tell Youssuf Adbulazeez that he must be proud of the accomplishments of his son and four daughters. The oldest child, a daughter, is a chemical engineer with a Ph.D. who lives on the East Coast, the Joneses said. The second child lives in Kingsport, Tenn. The third-oldest, Dalia, is a teacher. And Yasmeen is in graduate school at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, they said.
But by 2009, Youssuf and Rasmia Abdulazeez’s decades-long marriage had reached a crisis point, court records show.
In a divorce complaint filed in Hamilton County Chancery Court, Ms. Abdulazeez outlined what she called a pattern of “inappropriate marital conduct” that included frequent abuse and assault, including a beating that prompted her to go to a crisis center, as well as her husband’s nearly total control of the household and its finances.
The couple’s children, the complaint said, were sometimes targeted, and Mrs. Abdulazeez accused her husband of “striking and berating them without provocation or justification.” (In the same filing, though, she said her children had “a fairly good relationship” with their father.)
According to his wife’s complaint, the elder Mr. Abdulazeez also declared that he had intended “to take a second wife, as permitted under certain circumstances under Islamic law, in the parties’ native state of Palestine.”
She had sought the divorce even after her brothers came from Kuwait and Washington to try to resolve the couple’s differences.
Within weeks of the filing, however, the couple reconciled and signed a postnuptial agreement in which Mr. Abdulazeez agreed not to “inflict any personal injury, harm or insult upon” his wife or their children. The couple also agreed to enter counseling, while Mr. Abdulazeez would pay his wife a monthly $200 stipend.
Another stipulation was that if the couple wanted a divorce, Mr. Abdulazeez would “promptly seek” one under Islamic law.
The lawyer who represented Mrs. Abdulazeez during the divorce proceedings, John R. Meldorf III, did not respond to a message. Mr. Abdulazeez did not hire a lawyer and could not be reached for comment.
The Joneses had also heard that one of the daughters objected to an arranged marriage supported by her father. “She didn’t want to do that, so she fled and went to England,” he said. But he said that the father had ultimately “mellowed out” over the issue. She returned home from England, and he did not force her to marry the man.
Mr. Jones talked about it with Youssuf Adbulazeez. “He said, ‘That’s a tradition in our country,’ and things like that, and I said: ‘Yeah, but you know this is the U.S.A. Our Constitution does have a little different opinion of that.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I understand that.’ ”
Mohammod Abdulazeez, who had been a good student in high school, landed at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he earned an electrical engineering degree and took an internship at the Tennessee Valley Authority.
His love of wrestling evolved into a love of competitive mixed martial arts — a sport his father did not view as appropriate for a Muslim. “Youssuf is a pretty strict, straight-line Muslim guy,” Mr. Jones said.
A video uploaded in July 2009 to GoFightLive, a YouTube account that collects video of mixed martial arts fights, showed Mr. Abdulazeez in camouflage shorts, participating in a cage fight with a man identified as Timmy Hall. Mr. Abdulazeez dominated the fight, pinning his opponent to the mat early and pummeling him.
Chet Blalock, former owner of a mixed martial arts gym in Chattanooga where Mr. Abdulazeez trained, said Mr. Abdulazeez, would allow himself to be choked while fighting until he lost consciousness. Several times, he recalled, the young man would be out cold, revive himself, then take a brief breather before continuing to train.
“It’s a bit on the extreme side, even for mixed martial arts,” Mr. Blalock said. He now thinks that Mr. Abdulazeez may have been testing his threshold for pain.
Mr. Abdulazeez worked briefly at an Ohio nuclear power plant in 2013, but was dismissed after just 10 days after the company determined “that he did not meet minimum requirements for ongoing employment.”
A company spokesman did not elaborate. But The Associated Press, citing an unnamed federal official, reported that he had failed a drug test.
At the time of the shooting, he was working in Franklin, near Nashville, at Superior Essex, an Atlanta-based wire and cable manufacturer.In 2014, he took a seven-month trip to Jordan, saying he was visiting an uncle on his mother’s side. He had made several other trips to Jordan and Kuwait before that. Back home, his only known arrest involved the D.U.I. charge.
Three days before the shootings, he posted two entries on a personal blog, both religious in nature. One of them retold the parable of the blind men who feel the parts of an elephant, but are unable to grasp the whole. “As Muslims, we often do this,” he wrote. “We have a certain understanding of Islam and keep a tunnel vision of what we think Islam is.”
Muslims, he wrote, speak of fasting, reading the Quran and performing other devotional acts. By contrast, he noted, the original followers of the Prophet Muhammad were people of action, with “almost every one” becoming “a political leader or an army general.”
“Every one of them fought Jihad for the sake of Allah,” he wrote, adding that they had a “comprehensive” understanding of Islam and “applied what they knew.”
“We ask Allah to make us follow their path.” he concluded. “To give us a complete understanding of the message of Islam, and the strength the live by this knowledge, and to know what role we need to play to establish Islam in the world.”
Some have said they saw a difference in Mr. Abdulazeez after his return from Jordan, but others, like Ali Shafi, who attends prayers at the Islamic Society, said he did not observe much change in his demeanor upon his return from Jordan. Mr. Shafi, 16, said he was a longtime family friend of the Abdulazeezes. Mohammod sometimes led religion classes at the Islamic Society. At times, the two young men played basketball in the gym next to the prayer rooms.
When he began coming to the mosque after his time away, Mr. Abdulazeez was the same as ever, Mr. Shafi said: That is to say, he was serious about religion yet easygoing.
During this year’s monthlong celebration of Ramadan, which just ended, Mr. Abdulazeez was a regular at the Islamic Center, Mr. Shafi said. On Wednesday, he stayed with other faithful to read the Quran late into the night.
It was sometime around midnight Wednesday when Mr. Shafi saw his friend for the last time. He was leaving the mosque in the old gray Camry.
Mr. Shafi asked how he was doing. Fine, Mr. Abdulazeez responded. “Alhamdulillah,” he added — Arabic for “thanks be to God.”
Then Mr. Abdulazeez drove off into the darkness.
